AsicMiner was lucky to be basically the first company to produce a working ASIC. But now there are many more people in the market and they just can't repeat the success they had before.
Why can MPOE repeat the success it had when bitcoin was worth $5 a piece?
There have been hundreds of new bitcoin companies in the two years and many of them have publicly traded stocks/IPOs.
Why do people think MPEX has potential when literally nobody wants to list their company on the exchange?
On the one hand you are focusing way too much on dividend, you should be looking at earnings instead, and on the other hand mining will yield more than 8m btc in the future (due to fees). Overall, the estimate is that mining rewards will go down in the future, while there is no such restriction for trading fees.
There is no "restriction" on transaction fees either. Theoretically asicminer could end up with every single bitcoin in existence if they mine all the new ones and earn all the other btc from sales/transaction fees.
Why does AM have less potential when they are currently pumping out massive amounts of hardware?
Compare that to MPEX which currently has ~10btc worth of trading volume per month (excluding s.mpoe manipulation/inflation), has zero non-MP-owned companies, and a dysfunctional/insecure exchange which has been offline for weeks now.
Could you imagine if the NYSE or NASDAQ went offline for weeks? I guess it wouldn't really matter if they had no stocks and less than $6,000 trading volume per month.
Based on historical examples, MP's lemonade stand would raise several thousand. In your example, it would then sell 5 cups of lemonade for $2.50. And then it would be worth several thousand (plus $12.50 - whatever ingredients cost), because it would still have several thousand bitcoins on hand.
MPOE raised 30,000 btc during IPO when btc was $5 each and gave out ~30k btc in divs for a total of 60K btc. How does touching 60k btc translate to a company worth 800k?
A better example would be if MP opened a lemonade stand, raised 20 bucks for supplies and sold 5 bucks worth of lemonade, 10 bucks worth of ice, 5 bucks from cup fees, and is now worth several thousand because technically he could sell 10 cups of lemonade to every lemonade drinker in the world some time in the future.
And now he has convinced people that his lemonade stand is sure to blossom in to a lemonade empire and that the worst thing anyone could do with their money is not giving it to him.