Why? Because there is no organizational structure, no clear goals, no clear and united strategies, no clear leadership, no clear decision making.
With all respect to you, you're probably not a developer and you probably didn't work for for large company with tens of thousands employees and thousands of people in IT department. There is NOT a clear strategy in such companies, because of their internal politics games and changes in structure.
The bitcoin project is the best example of this theory.
I cannot express how much I diagree with you! Bitcoin is the right oposite of
typical opensource project. There is clear leadership, clear structure and responsibility, which is very rare in opensource projects. Of course it isn't ideal, but after 13 years of commercial experience in IT I see it as normal. There is also pretty good agreement between independent parties like pool owners, which are basicaly competitors and have only small reason to cooperate.
Please don't mix development in bitcoin core/protocol and development of other related projects, like mining pools (getwork interface, LP, alternative clients). It's completely different story, but it's good there IS some progress.
I would have to agree with slush on this one. This open source project is pretty organized compared to the many other thousands of open source projects out there. Organization and structure is slowing coming into fruition with BIPs, leadership (Gavin), release candidates, GIT, etc. I would say the organization is comparable to Linux and BitTorrent development.
As for marketing bitcoin has a lot of publicity both good and bad but it has been in the lime light more than most open source projects. It's been featured on Slashdot numerous times. If you compare bitcoin and PayPal it is night and day in terms of marketing, so yes I agree with S3052 on this. I think most everyone wants to help out with their own ideas, but there is not really one central big marketing push. For example, what if we all chipped in for one super bowl ad?
In the end market forces will determine if bitcoin will succeed and not advertising. Bitcoin, in my opinion, has so many unique properties for it not to succeed. If it really is cheaper and faster to make transactions, if it's possible to make transactions "anonymous", if it's better than other alternatives then it will grow. I think for me it is a question of how fast it can grow.
I've pretty much devoted most of my time to marketing bitcoin with my blog and not trying to make money on it. Sometimes I wonder if I should start being selfish (no offense) and start building a site or trading bitcoins on the side.