Thank you for correcting me on several project details, I had been referencing a third party factsheet that had not been updated.

Also, please explain to me what 'good' the ASICs, GPUs and CPUs are doing while they are mining?

Well what the miners are doing is putting stake on the network in the form of work. Yes they are expending energy, but that is the entire point of POW. The security of the network comes directly from the energy requirement, without that energy requirement, the base cost of the equipment is not doing very much to actually secure the network.
On a side note, projects like Ethereum Casper seek to replace mining entirely with another form of consensus based on proof-of-stake. Where instead of spending money on energy costs "miners" would be locking up tokens of value on the chain.

Well, if a single entity is to come up with more than 14.5 PB, either to attempt a network attack or just to make profits, it would take ages to plot the drives and it would be extremely expensive to pull it off.

Well yeah sure, it would cost a good amount of money to attempt such an attack. It is the ease and cost when compared to other networks that makes me very skeptical of the utility of POC. More importantly, that 14.5 PB of storage on the network is not doing anything other than acting as a sort of pseudo-stake token that people have very differing availabilities of. If you really are interested in this sort of HDD mining, take a look at Swarm which is incentivized with Ether. Or you could even take a look at other projects like Filecoin which will be based on Ethereum and support the IPFS (permanent web) network. Several other projects with useful storage rewards are Sia and Maidsafe.

For a seemingly informed and rational bloke, you come off as being the strict opposite and incredibly biased towards the other coins and tech that you mention.

For starters, I am very biased. Not all cryptocurrencies are created equal and my opinions clearly reflect my views on what is most important in the crypto space. I want people to be in control.

"Everyting about this project screams scam."

Everything about you screams scam.

I promise I am not a scam. I have a very good understanding of game theory and the economic pressures behind blockchains and my opinions reflect my knowledge.

Stay informed,
-kale