I think what confuses me is that the distributed ledger is nice and all, but will never be faster or even necessarily more secure than a central one (yes yes, some trust in government regulation like the SEC is required but if we put our antiestablishment pitchforks aside and consider that random actors MAY be more malicious than the people that regulate the financial markets).

So what do you get? People trusting "centralized" front doors to something distributed. Like coinbase or any of the other exchanges. Now you have literally the worst of both worlds. Centralized but still slower and more expensive, + lack of regulation. I'm just not seeing it as ever being useful.