Nothing is going to stay in some fixed microcosm when it is projected to grow. Satoshi himself said that Bitcoin was going to be big or nothing, so there was no vision that Bitcoin would remain some niche experiment as it, of course, had to start out small before it could become bigger.
Again: once, while discussing future user base growth, Satoshi considered 20% per year (doubling every 4 years) a "crazy" rate of growth. That would be consistent with his chosen block reward schedule (halving every four years). With a "non-crazy" growth rate of less than 20%/year, the USD value of the block reward would have deceased with time, forcing the system to transition gradually to fees.
Surely he was too smart to risk actual predictions, but on the other hand he cannot have expected the price to rise by a factor of 10 every year for 5 years. So the USD value of the block reward too
increased by almost he same factor, instead of decreasing as he may have expected.
The price rose so fast because of speculative investment and trading, fueled by predictions that it would one day replace VISA. That surely is a use for bitcoin that he did not expect. If there is something that the world did not need in 2009, and will never need, is another penny stock. He would not have bothered creating bitcoin, if he knew that it would turn into that.
Surely, this is a speculation forum, but when you get into prognosticating what some kind of fictitious founder wanted, you are getting into lala land.
In reality, it does not matter what one founder or anyone else wanted, when some invention is crowd sourced, the invention becomes public and becomes what the majority of influential forces wants, so who really cares about the irrelevant point about what may have originally been intended... and attempting to assign such visions really amounts to wishful thinking instead of acknowledgement of various positive developments.
You attribute certain negative values to positive historical matters. Price appreciation is a good thing and likely to be within foreseeable possibilities. Bitcoin has not become ruined because of price appreciation and various accompanying speculation, but price speculation has become a feature of bitcoin that needs to be accounted for in order to assist in determining its history and some of the dynamics of where it may be going.
Accordingly, it is also foreseeable with any paradigm changing invention that parts of its direction and applications are going to to evolve in ways that are not exactly known, but may be within feasibility even if scope, quantity and negative and positive attributes are not quite known.
Overall, your ongoing supposedly academic interest remains quite skewed in its selective picking and choosing of which parts of history you want to emphasize about bitcoin and continuing to paint your obvious selective negative pictures of bitcoin dynamics.