My normal thoughts revolve around cheap incentives, raising money, and marketing.

dApps are dApps because they interact with apis exposed by smart contracts on-chain. A new dApp, if it requires new on-chain features, requires a new smart contract because existing smart contracts cannot be modified except under specific circumstances, and only with the cooperation of the original contract’s key holder. So, if you need specific token features, you need your own specific token.

I think that’s partly true. But there’s another reason. Dapps often need to make changes and ideally it shouldn’t just be up to the original developers to make these decisions arbitrarily. A governance token can ensure that decisions are made trustlessly by people who are actually invested in the protocol.

Good question and one I’ve often wondered. I came to the conclusion its all about making money for something that isn’t otherwise able to generate revenue.

Cheap rewards, raise funds, and marketing is what I usually think. If you’re giving ETH as rewards you have to acquire ETH. Reward token you mint yourself, way less costly. People usually expect a project to put up liquidity but a lot of times that’s after a token sale. Even cheaper potentially is like NFT rewards for using the mainnet/testnet. Don’t have to put up liquidity

You generally don’t get equity in the company backing the DApp. DAOs are a work in progress and without equity in the company, off chain operations binding to DAO votes is questionable. I don’t mind if I get them as rewards for using the platform as I generally already would have, otherwise I ignore DApp tokens.