I wonder if part of this is due to dust. My understanding is that at these prices you don't really want to split a coin for a $.25. As a result it's poor for micro payments and daily macro payments alike.
My bet is that it hasn't caught on as a medium of exchange simply because that's not really a major pain point. Cryptocurrency's competition as payment isn't $USD; it's Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Stripe, Square, and other payment processors. People bitch about these companies, but they usually bitch about them from a concentration-of-power-and-fees standpoint (which Bitcoin doesn't actually solve, once you consider the costs of the commercial Bitcoin exchanges), not a convenience one. When it comes to convenience, whipping out a wallet-sized piece of plastic or your cell phone is a lot better than waiting 12 minutes for a transaction to settle on the blockchain.
It died off because _some people_ tried to turn it into a real thing for micro transactions, etc.
Certainly made it hard for me to take it seriously as a semi-layman at the time.
> So that made you less likely to trust the code/governance?
Well... yeah! What's your point? That projects deserve trust based on their branding? I'm not convinced until there's peer approval, especially not if it's piggybacking on something "trendy".
I do agree though it's a shame it got subverted from the ultra low value p2p tipping platform it was becoming. Feels like it's just litecoin left as credible alternative in that area.