IMO Ripple is inherently flawed with it's instant creation and centralization of money supply. Proxying transactions doesn't add much, if any, benefit to today's marketplace -- we already have services to exchange with (albeit with high fees).
You can ignore their money supply - you just need 300xrp to start with and then you can make hundreds of thousands of transactions in whichever currency you choose.
It's potentially an open source p2p distributed network for moving funds (potentially being the key word)