The utility of elliptic curve cryptography Suppose that the only public key cryptography schemes that we knew were Diffie Hellman, RSA and ElGamal. How much would this set civilization back? Are there important applications of elliptic curve cryptography [specifically] without viable substitutes?

[Edit: I came across this question which gives some information, but I'm looking for more. Specifically, I would like to know how much better elliptic curve cryptography is/(would be) than more classical encryption schemes for the applications where elliptic curve cryptography is superior.
If you are restricted to Diffie-Helman, RSA, and ElGamal, I believe you cannot do pairing based cryptography which has applications to attributed based encryption and identity based encryption. These applications are not used heavily in practice, but could be in the next decade or two.

For more information on speed benefits of ECC, see this question and answers. Based on my own testing comparing the elliptic curve variant of exponential ElGamal (which is additively homomorphic) with Paillier (also additively homomorphic and similar-ish to RSA), the elliptic curve cipher was 2 orders of magnitude faster for both encryption and decryption (with a few realistic assumptions as decrypting exponential ElGamal can be tricky). Thus I believe encryption was something like 100ms on one device for Paillier vs 1ms on EC-ElGamal. Decryption was similar.