The centralised nature of Ripple and their huge reserves are exactly what is making it attractive to banks. Bank interest in using XRP was the original rumour that drove it up, plus the company locking up their reserves in contracts so they could not dump all the 60% outstanding into the market at one go. But you're right of course, this isn't what people usually think of as a cryptocurrency. Caveat emptor! (Buyer beware).

I had not heard of the alleged weakness in Ripple consensus. That's worrying. Ditto the freeze assets. But now that Stellar and Ripple both have compliance features built in to allow anti money laundering etc. rules to prevent you trading. Maybe that is the same thing. Both rely on gateways or anchors and ultimately every single crypto relies on some service of you want to turn your digital assets into fiat - unless you want to trust some shady guy on the street with a sack of cash.

Personally I think 2018 will become the year of the decentralised exchange, especially autonomous ones. That will make it extremely hard for centralised authorities to force tokens to be delisted and such. See my article from a few days ago: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@o1o1o1o/2018-is-the-year-of-decentralized-exchanges