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.

I plan on using Bitcoins as a convenient, very-low-cost means of exchange.

I don't plan on saving a significant number of Bitcoins as a store of value.

If you use Bitcoins as a store of value... well, then you're a currency speculator, which can be highly profitable but is also highly risky.  Whether you're hoarding dollars or euros or yen or Bitcoins...