Many are envious and resentful of NEM playing a leading role in the transformation of the new economy, but in time they will soon have to accept it.
Sounds like you're girded up for the pushback.
NEM was envisioned in part as the silver to Nxt's gold. If that's still the long-term vision, then Nxt itself has to be seen as the "gold." This scenario is pretty much what I settled upon with respect to the crypto I'm affiliated with, HZ. One of the interesting wrinkles of HZ from the start, back in the day when it was NHZ, was the distribution method. Interestingly, the original dev hit upon a neat plan to combine proof-of-stake and proof-of-work with a Nxt clone: keep a node running and you get a daily subsidy (originally 666 NXZ.) "Proof of node" worked, with very little controversy. It was so uncontroversial, NHZ fell under the radar.
That digression out of the way, taking NEM to the next level is going to require a hard chore - a chore that I myself keep ducking out of by using this board for "practice".
The hard chore is outside evangelization. Spoetnik was right when he observed that a lot of us would-be evangelizers are more-or-less spinning our wheels here. 
