I actually got kind of excited about bi / tri-metallism once I learned more about it.

I have a friend who, for the last number of years, would always go on about how silver was "historically under-valued" vs gold. But now it's clear (at least to me) that silver was useful insofar as it was less scarce than gold, and when you're carting the actual metal around and transacting with it, that's a useful property. But now that we're not carting it around nor transacting with it, its monetary premium is eroding. I would expect it to continue to erode, and now I can make a more coherent argument about why.

I like your metaphor -- something very like that at work in the dissonance-reduction world I think: the best model of reality is a lower-energy state; although the tricky notion of what "best" means complicates it as per usual.