I think this is a great project.
I also agree with BOINC regarding the policy, as reactionary as it is, of keeping crypto out of the official BOINC UX -- I see this as more of a 3rd party project.
BOINC is science based. Its reputation is outstanding in the scientific community. Crypto is, at the moment, money based. It is associated with greed, scams, hacks, and volatility. It is critical that BOINC maintain its scientific reputation. Without this reputation all projects, including Project Rain and Gridcoin, would suffer if not fail outright. Once crypto has worked past its current reputation, perhaps BOINC will integrate, but for now I understand why it wants to keep a safe distance.
That's the thing though, the BOINC middleware software is unbiased and not solely made for scientific computation - you can distribute anything through BOINC, not just scientific projects.
Yes and no, many people know of the main projects (seti, wcg, etc) however it's not mainstream, there has been a large downtrend in user retention over the last decade and we aren't seeing new projects being created by large hardware manufacturers nor scientific organizations.
So is FIAT money though.
I disagree, reputation has no influence on my ability to pay a small VPS bill each month. Likewise, gridcoin will keep operating as long as users keep their wallet staking.
With their current stance, I do not believe they will ever change. We'll need FIAT markets to collapse first (thankfully not far in the future..).