You are falsely conflating everyone switching ("nobody really cares about Bitcoin any more") with loss of marginal use cases (EG SatoshiDice and coffee). That's not how the substitution effect works. What actually happens those who gain the most value from Bitcoin stay and those who gain the least switch. That is basic economics.
When oil prices rise, we demand/produce/consume (IE substitute) more coal, nat gas, and alt energy instead. That doesn't mean nobody really cares about oil any more.
With a 1 MB blocksize limit one has 3 tps (reasonable practical estimate) for the current Bitcoin network. This translates into approximately 95 million transactions per year.
So here are some questions:
What non marginal use cases do you expect the average person to be able to use Bitcoin for?
Do you expect on average those transactions to be mined within that average person's life expectancy? That of their children? That of their grand children? That of their great grand children?
Please do the math.
I'm glad to see you no longer pushing your fake 'all-or-nothing' version of the substitution effect. That's progress I can work with.
There are too many 'non-marginal use cases for the average person' to list here, given
The true value that Bitcoin brings to the table is not "everyone gets to write into the holy ledger", it is instead "everyone gets to benefit from sane and non-inflationary financial instutions whose sanity and honesty are ensured by the holy blockchain".
And that's not even accounting for the additional capacity enabled by SC+LN.
The second question is you feigning obtuseness and being snotty. You can do better than that; you know damn well if you want higher tx priority you simply have to pay for it. You also know RBF makes that arrangement flexible, adaptive, and dynamic.
It would be great if you could stop pretending Bitcoin's Layer 1 was created (and/or is able) to replace commercial banking, cash, plastic, and Starbucks gift cards while remaining diverse/diffuse/defensible/resilient. Please do the engineering.