So what it looks like to me is that you are saying that a paradigm shift so large as for you to be paid your regular salary in bitcoin is required for bitcoin to become cheaper? I'm not saying that bitcoin isn't ideologically better. I am saying that it is going up against practical considerations that are keeping it from going mainstream. So far in this thread people's conditions by which bitcoin becomes cheaper have all been very impractical, at least in the short term (10 years or so.) Even if your employer were to pay you in BTC, your company would have to pay the exchange fee.
My topic isn't what does BTC need to do for YOU to love it. My topic is what does BTC need to do for mainstream users to love it.To me the only solution is for the exchanges to somehow drop the deposit fees.
There are several companies that are already paying their employees with bitcoin, if not their entire salary, then at least a portion of it. Those companies that are willing to accept bitcoin as payment will have to do something with those bitcoin that they receive. They could exchange it for fiat (costing them "exchange fees"), but it is cheaper for everyone involved if they just use it to pay those employees that are interested in receiving some of their salary in bitcoins.
Those employees will then be looking for somewhere to spend those bitcoins rather than exchange them. This creates additional opportunities for additional companies to accept bitcoin and a market pressure to do so. Those companies can then use those bitcoins to pay some of their employees salaries as well. And so on, and so on.
If a company's supplier announces that they will accept bitcoin as payment, then there are even more reasons for the company to accept bitcoin: customers that want to pay with it, employees that want it as a portion of their salary, and suppliers that are interested in receiving it as payment. The best and most profitable way for the company to acquire these bitcoins isn't to exchange fiat for them, but rather to accept bitcoins for their product/service.
Note: Bitcoin is already being used. You keep talking about what needs to happen before it can be accepted (by the public or by companies). It already is. The rest is the snowball of network effect. The only question is how quickly will the bitcoin economy expand.