Not at all. It's not hard to understand really..
The thing holding other crypto back is the amount of capital people are willing to trust to them. Not necessarily the amount of users. The increasing ecosystem size is a result of capital, speculative or not, being stored into Bitcoin. As far as the nature of the speculation this is beside the point which is that Bitcoin is not used, as we speak, as a medium of exchange to purchase goods or services.
People are not buying Bitcoin because the number of transactions or users is seemingly increasing. They are buying because it attracts wealth unlike what most other coins can claim.
I've stated this repeatedly but I honestly believe it to be true: we are talking about a money protocol, a money network effect. the unit concerned is not number of users but amount of capital.
Think of it like this : if the 1% of the world's population who apparently controls around 40% of the world's wealth moved that money into Bitcoin it would do more to strengthen & grow the ecosystem than if 25% of the other people on earth invested all of their savings.
Capital flowing into Bitcoin is absolutely about expected future growth, in users, transactions, market cap, and in usefulness. Hard for me to comprehend how you can even divorce these metrics.
Remaining the domain of 10,000 geeks sitting on hordes of coins in paper wallets, occasionally trading some back and forth with each other... means failure to me. Not that it would fail to work, but that it would fail to reach its potential.
This is not to say that user/transaction growth is some kind of panacea to be pursued at all costs, just that it shouldn't be ignored.
Yes. And much like the others your mischaracterize the only growth we are really concerned about : market cap, or how much of the fiat economy we have absorbed. As I've said previously I couldn't care less if it comes from the pockets of the 1% or the 99%. More fiat capital
trusting Bitcoin as money is exactly how it grows until it consumes all of wealth in the world.
Users, transactions are secondary. They will follow the money because like any thing worth a lot in this world people will want a piece of it. Velocity of transactions will pickup once an actual Bitcoin economy develops. Meanwhile people will hoard Bitcoin and get rid of fiat. Some might not agree but this is pretty much Gresham's law in action.
While you may not consider them "panacea to be pursued at all costs", others have outright stated this is the ONLY goal to be pursuing and that it should be done as quickly as possible. They would like to run Bitcoin like a startup. This is IMO the wrong way to go about it.