So the question is: To make bitcoin a forever prosperous gold rush or a mobile payment system like other similar solutions?
It's not an "this-or-that" thing. It's both.
If bitcoin was no usable payment system, it would have never had any worth. It's name is not bitgold, but bitcoin.
But if bitcoin would not have this aspects you describe, it would be just some kind of decentralized paypal (which is, btw, great). With those aspect it's some kind of decentralized paypal with gold (which is greater).
In this current situation, where it's unclear where Bitcoin is heading, too many people imho want to define what bitcoin is made for. There is no valid answer on this except: Bitcoin is made for what people do and what the network is capable to support. That's it.
Many people in eastern europe e. G. use Bitcoin to order from shops in western europe that don't accept credit cards from some countries in eastern europe. The same with people from africa.
Other people like to gamble in the internet, what is not allowed in their jurisdictation. Next people use Bitcoin to order drugs online. And other just use it to watch pornography without revealing their name.
And now there come some people and say: this usecases are not what bitcoin is made for?
Of course it will be good that bitcoin can satisfy all these use cases at the same time. But when you have a real world resource limitation and have to take some prioritizing, it is better to maintain the core properties of bitcoin and try to move those less important part to 3rd party service providers
For example, most of the payment related requests can be done through a couple of payment service provider, similar to people doing pooled mining. These service providers only provide transaction service at a low fee, but it has clearing channel towards many of the other institutions/merchants. And such service provider will also release average user from the pain of the steep learning curve of bitcoin security. Anyway nowadays less and less people select to run a full node client, using SPV client is basically no difference than using a web wallet
I think the most exciting aspect of bitcoin is that everyone without permission can be a central bank and start to create money, and let others to use their money. However that's not an easy task since this is a highly competitive market. But still if you lose the possibility to get bitcoin through mining, then bitcoin will lose its most fundamental advantage against fiat money