No one talks about altcoins paired to btc

It's hard to realize the actual value of new blockchain tech when literally everything is paired to btc on every exchange. The value of every altcoin doesn't come from the tech at all, it comes from how it is valued against btc. Arbitrage opportunities win every hour of every day over the actual value of tech. Yes even dear ETH which presumably has the best 2nd gen blockchain tech (by popularity and volume at least), the eth token doesn't have a value based on utility or the tech, but rather it is derived as a result of being arbitraged against btc very heavily. That isn't to say it isn't good tech, or doesn't provide real value, it's just the token price has almost nothing to do with that.

If every stock was paired to AAPL what would happen? Exactly the same thing. Small movements in either ticker introduces arbitrage opportunities, and HFTs beat everyone to the punch and stocks would be valued against AAPL in most cases.

This is what's been happening in crypto since the early days. There was a recent post about how to do 3-way arbitrage, but that can scale to 4/5/6 way with the right algorithms and capital. How is any new blockchain tech supposed to compete when it's native token just gets listed against btc the moment it gets popular? Exchanges doing this are actually hurting new tech, but they earn fees from it so they won't care.