In my opinion the real problem is that nobody wants this shit, and for the narrow market of people that do want it, Bitcoin is good enough. Therefore Bitcoin gets 99% of the adoption and the rest, whether bickering or productive collaboration, more or less gets nowhere.
Gresham's law - all alts are dumped for BTC. No stores will accept them until they get their own dollar pegs and then they might climb the ladder of store of value. It's funny how only Darkcoin and Eth seemed to have made any progress in that, but it was from pump and dumps and Darkcoin was then de-listed like Eth probably will be in the future.
That's not going far enough.
Nobody wants to
use any of this shit, Bitcoin included. Stores that accept Bitcoin usually do so via payment processors and auto-dump it. Accepting Bitcoin via payment processors is like an affiliate program for them; they don't care about the currency at all, it is just about traffic.
It just all doesn't serve any purpose that any sane mainstream person would care about, outside of a SHTF scenario. So until then the whole crypto phenomenon is a waiting game (which makes long term HODLing sane as speculation, but you don't need most altcoin features for that).
Trying design after design in a futile effort to chase "adoption" is churning investors to pay developer salaries. Bitshares investors are among the biggest suckers, since they paid (and I guess continue to pay, although I don't follow it closely) the Larimers to develop something which serves little to no purpose as decentralized crypto but can now be used as a vehicle to be paid again by banks for "blockchain".