Indeed the price must grow for the experiment to succeed, but it's more important that the price be the right price to best distribute coins to those who want them.
I cannot possibly disagree with this statement, but the question is what is the "right" price.
The bitcoin "business plan" would make a lot of sense if there was no speculation, and the price was determined only by its use as currency, according to the money velocity equation. Then the price today would be 5 $/BTC or lower, any interested person could mine and get some coins (even at a loss), big money would not try to take over mining, people would not be pushing it on the "unbanked poor" or pestering Wikipedia and Mozilla to "accept it", no one would pay Bloomberg time to sell it, etc. The user base would just grow naturally if/as people found it useful, and the price would slowly grow in proportion.
But things obviously did not work that way, and the current "business plan" makes no sense, sorry.