You're right; incompetent is a stretch. Some of them probably are, but others are just... I don't know, out of touch with reality? And others are probably there knowing they will lose, but showing up anyway just to make their presence known for one reason or another, whether naive idealism, or cynical attention-grabbing.
I'd love to kick both Trump and Biden to the curb, truly. Well, a little farther than the curb for Trump. But the only way to do that is to change the way the system works. There is no scenario where a) it is realistically possible to elect a 3rd party candidate, and b) a 3rd party candidate, if elected, would have the ability to make any meaningful change to the system.
Remember, we're talking about changing election law here. And who is responsible for changing laws? Not the president. It's the legislature.
If we want something like a viable Green Party or Libertarian Party or whatever, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency. If we want to eliminate FTTP winner-take-all elections for the presidency, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency.
And believe me, I do want all of that. Which is why the puritanical grandstanding about protest votes by people who don't seem to understand the fundamental rules of US government is so painfully frustrating. If people were half as passionate about actual politics as they are about arguing badly about politics on lemmy, change would be possible. Instead, they are bamboozled time and time again, like clockwork, every four years by political insiders who feed them the notion that a protest vote that help the worst possible candidate is the most meaningful action they can take.