Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.
Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.
I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".
Good high level summary.
I would add one more corner to the rock/hard place picture:
To break out of the status quo, we'd need to actively encourage user adoption / make XMR go "live". Devs have (understandably so, given their already taxing time constraints) said they think the project isn't ready for that yet (hence: the GUI delay).