I agree with the “Critical” point from @brad.olson.587.
The entry bar to polkadot ecosystem is a little bit high. We really want to see some pet projects to appear on the network, but substrate learning curve with all its beauty of modularity is still steep in comparison with smart contracts
And this is why ink! exists in the first place in my opinion. We want to lower entry bar as much as possible and provide a smooth transition from the smart contract development into the substrate.
Adding tutorials and workshops explaining how to transform the smart contract into the substrate pallet might be one of the options.
However, as a student, I notice that polkadot brand awareness is still lower than of alternative protocols. Newcomers in web3 still consider learning either solidity for Polygon, Avalanche or rust for NEAR (I don’t really have metrics to back up my points, but this is the personal impression I get from talking to different people).
What we really want to do is to build a developer momentum around polkadot and its tooling. We have beautiful tooling, some people just never heard of it, and we need to fix this.