I've grown tired of this discussion and don't have as much time to put towards it at this point.  So here's the last few thoughts I intend to post for a while:

Two main factors that go into whether or not someone chooses to adopt Bitcoin long term are if it provides a direct service to the adopter (they will adopt for as long as that expected serviceableness is worth the expected cost to them), and how strong their expectation is of Bitcoin gaining widespread long term adoption (according to their own idea of widespread).  Their expectation of Bitcoin's widespread long term adoption is based on how strongly they trust their own understanding (regardless of correctness) of why others are or might adopt it long term.

I do not think most people will be very confident in their understanding of why others are willing to adopt Bitcoin long term:

First most people do not and will just never understand Bitcoin at all.  All they know is that some people keep telling them it is a crypto-currency, and that it's secure, and that it's p2p, etc., but these assertions are near meaningless to most people, as are the technical details of how it works.

Second, they see that hardly anyone uses it, and no major merchants use it, so they quickly realize that can't spend it anywhere in any practical sense without costly research and perhaps a costly change in their lifestyle.

Third, it's not easy to acquire Bitcoins.

Fourth, most people don't feel like they gain anything by using Bitcoins when they could much more easily just continue using their government's fiat currency and credit/debit cards for trade.

The last three points are potentially fixable with time and effort, but the first one almost certainly isn't (most people have "better things to do").

I think the quickest and easiest way to overcome all of this and increase Bitcoin's chances of widespread adoption is for bitcoin to provide some direct service that the mainstream actually cares about (and of course at a cost people are willing to pay).  If they don't value the bitcoins or the system, and they aren't really sure why anyone else does, they aren't going to adopt it.  Very, very few will bother going out of their way to try to understand, either.  However, if they confidently understand what it can do for them and others at a small enough cost, they might be interested.  People don't understand all of the technical details of how paypal does what it does, but they do understand how it can help them send and receive already established government fiat currency easily online...Paypal's service is a directly serviceable good.  People are told that when using Bitcoin you can easily send and receive bitcoins...but this is practically meaningless to almost everyone.

Unless you believe pure hype can sustain the "bitcoin economy" indefinitely (I'd point to the fall in prices since $32+ as evidence suggesting it can't), Bitcoin needs to provide something a significant portion of the population would actually care about, and it's not doing so, yet.  This is why I keep coming back to bitcoins needing to be a directly serviceable good, because without that, adoption will almost certainly continue to be very low as very few people will be confident in their understanding of why anyone else would adopt it, eliminating the only reason left to adopt it themselves.