Thinking about L1 design: why do we always start with tokens instead of infrastructure?

Hey everyone,
this is more of a thinking out loud post than anything else.
I’ve been working on a blockchain project and keep noticing the same pattern everywhere:
most L1s start with tokenomics, incentives, listings, hype
and only later try to “fix” the actual infrastructure.
We’re trying to go the opposite way.
Infra first. Protocol stability first. Dev experience first. Econimics later.
Some things I’m personally stuck thinking about:
Does separating settlement and execution actually reduce complexity, or just move it around?
Where does privacy really belong in a modern stack: network, tx, or identity layer?
At what point does “resilience” start fighting decentralization instead of helping it?
Are adaptive systems worth the loss of strict determinism?
Not selling anything, not posting links.
Just curious how people here especially engineers think about this stuff, and what tradeoffs you’ve seen in real systems.