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".
As we approach the end of the emission, and if the adoption rate is stagnant, that perception risk will grow. We are currently at around 20% of the emission and a year from now we'll be at 50%. If we want to avoid that risk we have to specify deadlines at which some fundamentals
should be in place in order to drive adoption. These deadlines must be from a funding perspective.
We already have an idea of the milestones. (Embedded db and QoS, then GUI, blockchain size management). These achievements can be facilitated to the Dev Dream Team by means of well defined (time and money) fund goals as was already discussed.
Along side these developments is the ongoing work of patching/refactoring/commenting of the code. This could be addressed by a similarly ongoing funding, which is being hard to pinpoint.