I initially thought the high Gas fee to deploy a smart contract was a con, however I found that this is a huge deterrent for scam ICOs. This keeps the professionalism.
As for centralisation. The more nodes you have the harder it is to increase TPS, there are very good talks from NEO and Binance the sell-offs from going to a fully decentralised model. Also consider nothing is fully decentralised in crypto (maybe Nano).
NEO is 100% centralized, and its smart contract platform is 100% not being utilized by its community right now.