You can flip things around and actually present a counter argument - adoption is in fact at the right point, its that valuations cloud and distract people to that fact, and it is the market caps that are the illusions we need to turn our attentions to rather than blindly pressing on with all this swiss-army knife complexity, that just piles new problems on top of old ones.
You do not need a token or a blockchain for the vast majority of issues that the industry (inside and outside of the ecosystem) claims to address.
This forum has 1200 ‘members’ - why do we not consider that it is the network effects of these 1200 people that we need to build for. Sure its a small number, but if we build in a focused way for this super smart group of people, their interests, associations and talents, then I have no doubt 1200 can scale us into many thousands, and beyond.
When you begin with this core insight, the vast majority of the current ecosystem is effectively redundant - tokens as products, attempting to reverse their way into products and services.
Sadly people aren’t economically incentivised to face up to that fact, because, guess what, they want NUMBER GO UP! This leads us inexorably into a weird dream state - a beautiful delusion, where large groups of people - founders, investors and contributors aka ‘communities’ convince themselves that they need a token, when they almost certainly don’t.
Polkadot can afford to let tokens and chains die - they will do inevitably, but we cannot let the talent leave, this is what we must protect and support and develop.
Mission over the marketcap.