The Toomininstas are confronting the same problem the Gavinistas did, which is that multiplying a tiny number such as 3tps by another tiny (ie sane) number such as 2 or 4 or even 8 still only produces another tiny number such as 6tps or 12tps or 24tps.
You can't get to Visa tps from here. Our only realistic path to Visa is orthogonal scaling, where each tx does the maximum economic work possible.
Right, card payments are currently at around 5000 TPS on a _year round_ average basis, with highest day peaks probably at over 100k TPS. And that is now, these figures have been rapidly growing.
These are numbers high enough that just signature processing would completely crush even high end commercially available single systems. Even if you took some really great drugs and believed plain-old-bitcoin could get anywhere near matching that in the near future while having any decentralization remaining.... so what? it wouldn't be close again after just a couple more years growth.
This sounds like a MBA school failure example: Ignoring your strengths and trying to match one on one with a competitor in an area where you're weakest and the slowest to improve and they're strongest and the fastest to improve. Especially since considering payment networks as the primary competition for a _currency_ is a bit bizarre. Yet a payment network is all that
some have wanted Bitcoin to be... I don't begrudge that, but the weirdness of the goal doesn't relieve it from having to have a logically consistent roadmap, or permit it to take down the whole currency in its failure.
A trip to the moon requires a rocket with multiple stages or otherwise the rocket equation will eat your lunch... packing everyone in clown-car style into a trebuchet and hoping for success is right out.