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".
I've thought of picking up more on dips, but honestly, without a nice wallet I won't and for different reasons. 1 of which is I couldn't get the simple wallet installed from scratch. I could run it and I had the blockchain on my Mac but I didn't want to chance a non binary install. No longer a computer expert and didn't want to waste the time figuring things out (after 3 hours).
I thought the emission rate was ok, and the majority slowdown is in 3 or 4 years? Excuse my ignorance here.
Anyway, with their update of the wallet (screenshots and such) a month ago, I thought we were close. If they can get it out in the next month or two we have a chance but if they wait much longer anything can happen. We are not in the position of cutting off our nose to spite our face, via non action.
Any word on the wallet GUI?