Anyone see a use case for an ASIC powered monero that isn't maintained by that fat guy who's a friend of Blockstream?

Sure. As long as they copy all commits from the XMR repo (apart from PoW changes). But without adoption it's useless, so I see no way of XMO surviving.

Usecases would be the same - private crypto. But imo the PoW would have to change to as easy as possible so that ASICs are cheap AF and everybody could afford them. PoW has to go either dir.

if i needed a server farm the size of bitfury to mine monero it would mean i didn't give a flying fuck about my privacy