you said it yourself 'Code is not law, money is'. Money will always flow to the market with the highest 'capital efficiency', its like the laws of thermodynamics for economics/human greed lol. This is the whole point why people perform the ridiculous undertaking to build dedicated fiber-connections between stock markets on different continents.
we already know DeFi does outperform traditional markets in this regard in important topics. Its an engineering task to increase the % in this still very young discipline. But IMHO it is mostly a question of regulation to have a significant shift
Objects and ideas do not have intrinsic value. Value is a subjective judgement of individuals at a particular time and place. We will find out the new price after the merge.
