It will be hard to really give a deep (and unbiased) comparison of these two platforms, so I won’t attempt.
But I did want to make a few comments based on your post.
First is that while I understand where you are coming from with some of the questions above, I urge you to separate your questions between those about the core pillars of the platform, things which cannot be changed, and those which are more ephemeral.
For example: I think it would not be wrong to say today that Cosmos is probably the “easier” platform to build and learn with today. A lot of this comes from the fact they use Go, which seems much more friendly to new developers. It is also fair I think to note they have 1 - 2 years of a jump start from when cosmos started launching their chains, to when Polkadot started launching parachains. Finally, I believe some things are more simple on their side because they focused a lot more on creating blockchains centered around tokens / defi, versus blockchains centered around general computation, but this is where I am speaking beyond what I truly know.
What I want to point out about those questions is that even though Cosmos may be easier to learn on today, we are definitely trying our best to flip that, and I would hope that decisions about building unstoppable decentralized applications are not chosen about “what is easiest today”. Instead, when picking a platform to build your business on top of, you want to select the one which makes the right technical and philosophical decisions.
In that context, I think this is where we would argue that Polkadot has major advantages over all other next generation blockchain platforms.
- For computational scaling, we use parallelization of execution via sharding (which is working in production today; not part of a future roadmap).
- For resource / economic scaling, we use shared security provided by the relay chain.
- For liveness, we use a split of BABE for block production, and GRANDPA for finality.
- For future compatibility and performance, we use Wasm at the heart of all state transition functions.
- For ease of mind and performance across all of our software, we use Rust.
- For agility of development, we have on-chain governance and upgrades at the heart of our technologies.
- and so on…
These are not things which are easy to understand the importance of by looking at NFT drops, comparing TVL, or even reading a whitepaper. These are decisions which compound with every block that your chain produces. The impact of these decisions are felt in many years, and through many crypto bull and bear cycles. Through new laws and regulation, and the ability for platforms to nimbly navigate those changes.
Anyway, this is my perspective on the topic, rather than my answer to your question. I hope it can guide you toward finding the questions which are important, and the answers you need.