Well the three second confirmation times have more to do with us using DPoS instead of PoW. DPoS is much faster and more efficient than PoW in many ways.
Regarding "general purpose" vs "specialized", general purpose is setup to use smart contracts, which allow people to write applications to do pretty much anything. (Take CryptoKitties for example.) Specialized does not allow developers to create any app they want, but for the apps that are supported - it tries to do a really good job at doing them well. By specializing in a narrow niche, it allows us to become the best at it.
Gotta be honest , general purpose sounds evolutionary and specialized sounds creationist.
I am sure it's more nuanced than that in the details of the implementation. Maybe in the sense that specialized can support a class of apps vs choosing specific apps?
Well, if you go to google.com, what can you do? Search. That is pretty much it. Google.com does one thing, but they do it really well. Is it bad that google.com won't do your taxes for you?
That pre-supposes as a fact that one thing you do really well is a very valuable ( also the search function is then support by the complicated ad system in the background).
An evolutionary approach would let the system run multiple experiments and land on the one which has inherent value.
As I noted in previous comment it's possible that even within specialized nature , evolutionary models are supported by building for class of apps vs chosen apps.
Thanks for your responses in any case.