The core element that hide behind bitcoin is the elimination of third party or the intermediary. The real purpose for which this got innovated isn't fulfilled, because even the stores that accept bitcoin into their business use services like bitpay.
There still seems to be quite a bit of ongoing empowerment of businesses because they can choose to use third parties or not... Also, we have ongoing development in which some ways of interacting with bitcoin might become less complicated. For sure, there is a certain level of technical complication with the lightning network, and it seems that one of the costs of having individual empowerment in a decentralized and open source way is not really easy to carry out without a decent amount of complications.. A decent amount of the value of both bitcoin and the lightning network is the difficulties to attack - so there is a kind of power that comes through these kinds of services that have never really been available to people before. Third parties can help to make the use of the services less complicated, but then as you suggest ends up taking away some of the power of the whole bitcoin/lightning network systems to the extent that a large number of people/businesses start to rely on the third-party systems.
Bitcoin is for all levels of people and there is no discrimination. However the growth has made it to be affordable for specific group of people. However it is possible to buy based on our investment ability making it an accessible asset for everyone. With time changes will happen, and until then market doesn't look like a diversified one.
There are always going to be difficulties with conceptualizing ideas of what is a fair launch and the extent to which normies have had reasonable access towards investing in bitcoin, and for sure a certain amount of technical knowledge or even access to the internet would have allowed for people to have exposure to bitcoin and appreciate the practicalities of it. Of course, there has always been a certain amount of hoarding going on in bitcoin, and even in the past year and a half, Michael Saylor has been promoting the idea of hoarding and even doing that for himself, so of course, hoarding pushes up the BTC price and makes it more difficult for later comers to acquire anything close to as much bitcoin as the earlier adopters.
So, in some sense, there is quite a bit of incentive for normies to become sufficiently aware of bitcoin and to act to start to accumulate BTC at whatever level that they are able to muster up based on their own circumstances... the longer that normies wait to get in, the smaller the level of BTC stack that they are going to be able to accumulate, yet I will argue that even late comers to bitcoin will still have a lot of potential to be empowered to come into bitcoin because in a large sense bitcoin is designed to pump forever.. and even now days we may well ONLY have less than one percent of the whole world who have any kind of meaningful exposure to bitcoin, and a certain number of those who do have exposure to bitcoin are holding a decently large number of coins as compared to some kind of "bitcoin share" that would presume a kind of equal proportion (distribution).. so there is some personal responsibility to both learn about bitcoin and to start to accumulate bitcoin as early you can.. and for sure, many of us likely know quite a few people who still have not gotten much of any exposure to bitcoin, and part of the reason is their failure/refusal to act and to set up systems to start to accumulate.
Of course, there are some people who really have not yet heard of bitcoin or do not have any real understanding of what bitcoin is, and there is ONLY so much that can be done to help them in terms of learning about bitcoin in order that they are going to be able to help themselves.... and ultimately, it is not easy to figure out ways to inform the less informed folks in order that they can be advantaged by bitcoin, and surely some people do "get" bitcoin sooner and more quickly and even though someone like Michael Saylor and his company have learned about bitcoin in a relatively late (and recent) time, he and his company look like early adopters partly based on their level of aggressiveness in terms of accumulating (hoarding) bitcoin in a very prompt way once he and his company did find out about bitcoin.. and for sure, he found it to be a more beneficial way of going about his accumulation (and hoarding philosophy) in a quite public way (and surely he is a very articulate person who puts the whole matter in very clear terms).