Programmer wondering why to use ETH.

I have my own little business and have been dabbling in crypto for fun since it came out. Now, I've had some customers talk about using it in their database systems.

I like ETH and ADA, but I pretty much just sit on it. I figured we'd do some testing with smart contracts to shot the client as examples.

The gas price on Eth was pretty high or the speed was unacceptable. So, I don't get it? I like my portfolio getting bigger and all, but I invested in it SOLELY because I saw it as a technology that would dominate the automation of financial software. But now.... Not so much.

Ada is super fast and cheap in comparison, but I don't know haskell or Rust, but I certainly don't want to spend 200k writing a software that's going to be inefficient or even irrelevant in a matter of years.

Ugh. I'm really disappointed here.

I now know "why" gas is expensive and people have told me 100 ways to bundle, etc... And even more have tried to push me on using chains like sol and nano and xrp, and I guess I'll need to research them. The thing that is driving me crazy:

If the gas fee is so high due to the networks transaction volume, why do people "transact"?. I just sit on mine, so I never even noticed. I just see the balance go up. But, who the F actually "uses" ETH when deciding to send someone $50 or something? Why would anyone actually "use" ETH to send someone money?

I must be doing something wrong. I'm praying I'm doing something wrong, because if it's just good for holding, then the justification I used for investing in it is completely wrong.

Something.... One of these chains... Is going to become the standard when developing software. AWS S3 pretty much standardized storage for us. S3 and Azure and Google Cloud Storage are practically identical, dominating software. A million other options just died in ignominy.

So, Why do people "transact" in Eth rather than chains that are literally thousands of percent cheaper and faster? Is there a reason I'm missing?