15 years is a eons for... technology. And Bitcoin has traveled further from it's goals of being a decentralized currency in that time, not closer.
The ETF in particular makes a mockery of the original goals of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a meme investment instrument, not a viable means of mainstream transactions. There's nothing wrong with that, but you might as well get used to calling it what it really is...
You're right about that. ETFs move Bitcoin away from its original purpose. Most people don't care about this because they only want market prices to go up over time. It's this "indifference" that will give banks and governments the ultimate victory over Bitcoin. Fortunately, not all hope is lost. The community can make a new fork with decentralization + censorship-resistance in mind. Or they can choose an existing fork like Bitcoin Cash and call it the "original Bitcoin". Things would've been worse if BTC was a closed source cryptocurrency.
I know development progress has taken longer than usual, but let me tell you that scaling the Blockchain is no easy task. Especially when developers have to make a balance between decentralization and convenience. Otherwise, BTC would risk turning into a centralized coin like XRP and the likes. I'd wait 10 more years to see what happens.
Until the basic laws of physics are repealed, there will be no way a decentralized infrastructure will scale to the level needed to truly take on the world-wide credit card infrastructure (which is just a
start in taking over currency generally).
And even
centralized cryptocurrencies using blockchain are too slow and expensive to scale to this level. XRP touts aspirational numbers of "a thousand transactions a second" when a real competitor would need to be several
million transactions a second. There's simply
no way you can do this with blockchain, and you'd instead need to use a non-blockchain paradigm like
Haypenny.
Blockchain is a great platform for meme investments like Bitcoin or NFTs, but it's not suitable as a real, mainstream currency and never will be.