I believe this has always been the generational thing. When a new development is introduced at the early stage, it wont get the needed acknowledge, and price just like we see at the early stage when gold was used as a medium of exchange the same thing happened with BTC during the stage you pointed out and it is not that those gamblers back then had no idea how important BTC would be in the future. But they pay the price for us to use BTC for gambling, payment for goods and services
If they don't understand or visualize the future of BTC, why would most of them spend their time mining it or using it online?

What we see here is the price paid by early adopters. Laszlo Hanyecz paid the price of using 10,000 Bitcoin BTC for payment of physical items (pizza), and it is something that paved the way for BTC to be used for real item payment.