It was launched in 2009, your "trust" estimate is hardly quantifiable.. and now all of the coins have another element to slow them down "competition"
so the road you describe is not as simple as you make out.... and Dogecoin is still no where near as big at Bitcoin, and if you somehow think that it
will manage to overcome problems that you see in Bitcoin then I would like to know why, as I see problems coming for Doge, partly because it is a immature network. Besides we are not talking "become popular" you are saying get bigger than Bitcoin with 1 year or 2 , and it will be a superior coin, and that is does not exist yet... I am not refuting you outright... I am asking you to describe the birth and journey of this coin and what will make it what you say.
Also it is one thing to say that you can innovate a new coin, with superior features, that will appeal to people, but another to actually do it...
Writing, coding, testing, creating these special Bitcoin beating features you propose is all going to take time (I mean do you know what these features are? can you list some of them) as is getting miners onboard, and then reaching the network size of the BTC, unless they come up with a way to make a huge network spring up overnight.
I think there is going to be competition, and there will be "more than one"
But your timeframe of another coin reaching the network size, the marketcap, merchant use, public awareness etc of one to two years is tight...not impossible but tight... as in we must surely be seeing this coin be born anyday now?
Please do keep me posted, I would be very interested to know about this coin as soon as it appears!
I think while you feel others overestimate the importance of the head start and network headstart of BTC, I think you are underestimating it, as I have said I do believe there will be competition, so I am not flat out not in agreement, but I guess the next coin, the one that take its rightful place where Ripple is now, will be half the marketcap of BTC in one years time... if it is lucky...
Doge showed me perfectly that even with a product, that has no edge in quality whatsoever, can become an popular alternative even with lowbrow hype. Now imagine a coin that has better qualities and a professional marketing team behind it.
Coding has never been my thing, but what I have understood is that bitcoin isn't a good invention, but it's a good innovation. Meaning that the code in bitcoin isn't very complex but the way that the code is used and combined to serve this particular idea is the impressive part. And the thing with innovations is that they can easily be replicated and bettered. So, I think that when building will be picked up by anyone else then just some young students who do it out of boredom, then it can actually be made more refined quite quickly.
I would value bitcoins headstart more if the development of code would be faster. But it is very very slow and changes that need to be done in my eyes are not even adressed as future plans. So I picture bitcoin to be about the same as it is now in 2 years time and other people will have probably released better quality alternatives.