"All these things were put in place because your average person doesn't know what they're doing, and they think stock ownership is just gambling"
In order to not be an "average person," you must make 200K+ in salary or have 1 million dollars in cash?
I'm not saying that ICOs are currently perfect by any means. There will be a NEED for some type of regulation and time for the market to figure itself out. Unless youre in the elite group of VCs or a very wealthy person, then you should be excited about the ability to be able to directly invest in a company. As far as voting rights, that can be implemented in the tokens.
This is still very new and one should assume that the current state of ICOs will change as people start figuring it out
how is this any different from raising money from VC firms? The distribution probably isn't any better, but at least everyone has the ability to bet on a company