Grin, at 3.5 years since launch, is only 3.5% into its soft total supply [1].
Compare that to Bitcoin, which at 3.5 after launch was already 44% into its total supply,
Or to Monero, which was already over 80%.
Grin's emission is over an order of magnitude slower than *any* other coin.
So yeah, it will do miserably on marketcap for many more years to come.
Bitcoin reached the same 3.5 of its total supply in less than 3.5 months,
distributing only to a handful of people, and trading for fractions of cents.
I don't measure Grin's success by its marketcap, but by its elegance, simplicity, scalability, and long term survival.
For the short term, it may be only of academic interest in a crypto world that's completely dominated by speculation.
Tail subsidy will always continue to enrich the mining industry (and those close to it in the economy) at the expense of everyone else, creating a "winner" that can't be displaced by diffusion.
You have this weird idea that a coin's distribution is split into two phases:
a later phase of distribution to the "mining industry" which is enriching itself,
preceded by a distribution to "everyone else", who are now suffering at the hands of the former.
Never mind that in Bitcoin "everyone else" were receiving much larger block rewards at much lower effort.
The winner that can't be displaced by dilution in their lifetime is Satoshi, not some tail mining operation that in a competitive market makes a few % profit at best and would need many lifetimes to match Satoshi's stack.
Miners are simply the mechanism that helps distribute bitcoin to more people, and in Grin's case to more generations of people.
[1]
https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153