Personally, I think that the most likely scenario is that XMR will definitely beat out DRK/DOGE/PPC within 5 years and become a TOP-5 cryptocurrency behind perhaps litecoin/ethereum/bitshares with at least 3% of the overall 400 billion dollar crypto market cap, which would be $666.666/XMR, so I'm actually more optimistic than you. At that point, I become an Ultra-high net worth individual (if bitcoin hasn't already made me one) so we should definitely have a $100/XMR party.
I can now say I'm with you on this one, I've waited a considerable ammount of time after the Monero release before start buying, I watched the entire thing from the suppose exploit to the mega-dumps that are lot less frequent now. I was hoping for something "better" to be released after some months but I don't think this will be happening now, the only competitor (DRK) only has a higher marketcap because they changed the emission curve to
screw over new adopters and their technology is not good, its very weak from a technical view point. From what I could gather the cryptonote project is still mysterious but was in the making for several years, and the community fork lead by the Monero core team is really shining next to everything else.