Since people keep asking this question over and over Andy responded on Discord:

generally, the focus of the 'smart' features in Evolution (triggers) are to support additional conditionality and logic within our existing ('data') Contracts. Evo is not designed to be a 'smart contract' platform, it's designed 1 generation ahead of those platforms to be a user-based, mainstream, decentralized app platform that can employ smart functions as needed to support the primary functions... signing up to Dash with a username and integrating Dash functions into existing and new mainstream applications without trusting a 3rd party... there are already some of these 'smart' features implemented in the DPNS and DashPay contracts... but if you're working on the assumption that 'smart contracts' are the future of blockchains that operate as 'world computers' then that concept is outmoded in Evolution from the initial design.

Discord Admin readme added:

pls also take a look at the bounty ideas @andyfreer collected: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NQbRk38I-43FIGcy2FyK4DW_Er_FknpMB2IQprul-Ec/edit#heading=h.r7nnw51opkoq putting the focus on data has so much potential - so while i agree we need some data-triggers/validators/smart code/contracts etc. - there is so much to explore and to build with data-contracts alone that will keep us busy

Andy continues:

Yah there's actually a really easy way to explain this too... basically both Ethereum and Dash contracts have 2 aspects to them: Computation (trustless & turing complete code execution) and Data (trustless entity respresentation storage / ownership).

• Ethereum contracts are good at trustless code execution but terrible at Data

• Dash contract are great at Data but code execution is focused at conditionality / logic to support 3rd party Application's Data functionality, not non-financial computation aka 'blockchain world computer' (although as features like WASM are added, devs can try this, but the economics & usecases are against them)

...the reason is because actually it's the Data that's the important part as we see it for mainstream usecases... computation is super expensive and inneficient to run inside a blockchain network, and mainstream apps already have huge capacity cheap computation in their own networks. It's the ability to trustlessly represent users (by name), and the entities / digital assets they want to create, share, act on that is the focus on Evolution... and it's optimized to do that with v. low cost and high efficiency / ease of use for mainstream devs.

So we don't use the term 'smart contracts' in Dash as our contracts aren't focused on trustless compute, they're focused on trustless data, which we think is far more useful (although there are already 'smart' functions in the contracts and these will be fleshed out as needed to support the Data functions)

the data contract is basically a specification of fungible/non-fungible assets arranged in a schema (e.g. with rules, types, relationships, constraints) like you find in a database. The idea is users can own, monetize, transfer, within 3rd party (i.e. mainstream) apps that integrate to a Contract via a decentralized HTTP API so there's no central points of failure and both the app and end-users can create/access/transfer their data by signing with a unique Dash Username. This is basically impossible on Ethereum, or at least you'd have to jump through a ton of hoops and it would be extremely uneconomical to implement.