Well i guess you have your reasons...But Do you think, realistically, that bitcoin will ever succeed as a currency? (Not caring if it does, just thinking if it will)
No.
But I think it will have it's moment in the sun as a means of emergency capital flight and will burn much more brightly than it ever did before. Saying exactly when or how this will happen though is more a geo-political area than a financial or technical area.
Ultimately I think Bitcoin will implode taking billions of wealth with it. Until then it will have it's 'uses' and will continue to enrich some people and impoverish others. With that said, I do think that crypto currency is here to stay but that none of the present applicants need reapply. Think of the early days of the internet (since it was before you were born you may struggle with that). Today we have Google and Facebook who are undeniably the two most prominent and instantly recognisable internet brands. In the early days, neither of those two even existed. Both of these took concepts that were already firmly established (search engines and social networking), but just done them a whole lot better. Same thing is bound to happen in crypto currencies.
Nope, very bad analogy, shows that you still don't understand what bitcoin is. Today we have tcp/ip, just as we had it back in 1990. Supporting network of tcp/ip communicating devices have grown tremendously since then, but the protocol is still the same. Google and Facebook are just some of the currently popular applications on top of that. Will there be a whole application layer on top of bitcoin network? Absolutely. Does it mean bitcoin network will be thrown away? Not faster than ipv4, which is being replaced with ipv6 for 20 years now. Any change that requires replacing hardware infrastructure worldwide is hard and is done only out of absolute necessity. I don't see such a necessity with bitcoin (yet?).