It is mass adoption that counts (the grand scheme of things, in your terms), and I don't see us moving in that direction, slowly or otherwise.
We are going to have to agree to disagree again. It's difficult to measure "adoption", but we can look at surrogate markers like number of unique addresses, number of transactions per day, hashrate, and so forth, all of which are on a relatively steady upward trend
They may well be
So I have to take your word for it as I don't know if they really do. Regardless, do these markers really show the expansion in adoption? All of them can as well point in the opposite direction unless we agree adoption equals speculation. If not, all these numbers rising can be easily attributed to speculation expanding, which you should in fact expect given the half-year Bitcoin rally as of recent. You can't seriously ascribe the explosive growth from low 3k to high 13k within just a few months to adoption spreading like weed. Most certainly, what we see is the same old-school speculation at work here
There are sites which attempt to create lists of merchants which accept crypto, such as coinmap.org. Obviously, they will miss huge numbers of merchants, but even then, the number on that site is growing by around 50 a week
And here we go again (one more time)
How many of these merchants are in fact accepting crypto? If next to none, then this is not adoption. Well, we could indeed consider it half-adoption (for the lack of a better term) if people were actually paying with crypto there (as this is still a good start anyway). But we don't know that. Just adding the payment option is quasi-adoption at best. You can call it a required condition or prerequisite for future adoption but that in itself doesn't guarantee it just like Lighting Network doesn't guarantee it either
I'm totally cool with that but for most of us it is just a welcome bonus of sorts.
At the moment, maybe it's just a bonus. But governments around the world are moving ever more strongly towards blanket surveillance and monitoring of the population. They already freeze accounts and seize the money of people who speak out against them or cause them too many headaches. Perhaps you might find that being in control of your own money becomes more attractive in the future
Personally, I'm already in that future but it doesn't magically turn Bitcoin into a means of payment. There is a huge distance (and difference) between that and using Bitcoin as a store of value or a hedge (but I repeat myself)