To see if the project team is serious about their work, I don't start by looking at how "beautifully the roadmap is written." Instead, I check the treasury expenditures: where the money is going, and whether the spending is sustainable. The worst are those with a bunch of milestones but erratic spending patterns—either no activity for months or suddenly a large "consultant fee/marketing expense," then the community starts telling stories... Basically, execution details reveal everything.

I personally look for a few small signals: whether development-related expenses are continuous, whether the same vendors/addresses keep appearing (as if they are actually working), and whether there are on-chain activity changes after milestones, such as contract deployments, transaction volumes, governance proposals progress. They don't have to be very "articulate," but at least they shouldn't only have PowerPoint presentations.

Recently, everyone has been complaining about miner/validator income, MEV, and fair ordering, which I also understand well: if the treasury is shouting "user experience" on one hand, but most of the funds go to incentives and market making, and there's no progress on ordering fairness, then I find it hard to believe they truly treat retail investors as people... You say "a larger treasury means more security"? I feel a bigger treasury just means it can be burned longer.

Replying to your comment "just look at the treasury balance, right"… the balance isn't important; how the money is spent is what matters. Anyway, I’m more worried about teams that don’t know how to spend their money.