The people appreciate the value exactly because of used energy (entropy), if you want to rewrite Bitcoin history you are going to spend no less then it has boon spent. The limit of producing of bitcoins is not related to energy.
Yeah. I mean, people value the utility of it: it can be used to transfer value over the Internet, and you can’t steal it by changing values in the DB. PoW is just a means to an end here. I think we largely agree on that.
You could make eimrineCoin that's an exact clone of bitcoin, but it'd be extremely unlikely to reach a fraction of BTC's market cap, because others won't consider it valuable although it's mined with energy.