The project is five months old. If you assumed Counterparty would be on CNN and a household name by this point, you set your expectations too high.

Here is something that just came out a couple days ago that includes an unbiased discussion on where Counterparty is as a project, the discussions that we've been having in this thread with regards to OP_RETURN, and what the impact of those discussions is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrpuiaLbhEQ&feature=share&t=19m52s

The utility of Counterparty has outpaced the usability of the protocol. The usability is now catching up with the utility due to the upcoming release of Counterwallet.

I personally like Counterparty on Bitcoin and I hope that over the coming months a solution is reached that will allow us to stay on Bitcoin with the blessing of the core developers. I would suggest that moving Counterparty off of Bitcoin would be premature and that we should continue working with the devs to reach a solution that works for everyone, and that may very well be possible as technologies and opinions continue to evolve.