Who do you think it's users will be?
I expect that we will see a progression similar to the adoption of all new technologies.
After the bleeding edge here, BitShares early adopters are likely to be day-trading speculators who see it is yet another sparkly toy to pump-&-dump.
If I can get enough early adopters to embrace my '
entrepreneurs without borders' mindset, we might see post-
ISO-4217 issues, like BitGuatemalanLightRoastedArabica, BitJeanJeanRoosevelt's2015SongCollection, BitGhanaHotSauce001, and the like that can be used for international trade, but I expect that the day-traders could become a nuisance by pushing the prices around.
Who will it be marketed for?
Most likely, some kind of consensus will be sought in these threads, mixed with some of the executives' own expectations.
How do you imagine it breaking out of the altcoin micro-niche community?
That's pretty much the name of the game.
Considering that altcoins are empty tokens not meant to represent anything else, other than some imagined improvement on Bitcoin, one could argue that BitShares is categorically different from Bitcoin, and that it is as mistaken to think of it as an altcoin as it is to think of a Bitcoin wallet as a spreadsheet, although both are software that displays numbers.
On the other hand, such distinctions would be as lost on most as the differences among popular music styles today are lost on me, and nothing is to be gained by arguing with prospective users.
BitShares promoters might need to cut their own new path, rather than position BitShares against colored coins, Mastercoin, Open Transactions, Ethereum, et al.
My own expectation is that I can use BitShares to help price goods that are new to the market. Rather than see them as derivatives or even necessarily as bets, I see them as market research. For example, if I released BitHondurasMediumRoastArabica, it would be in the spirit of issuing Kickstarter-style pre-sales and asking prospective buyers what the price per kilogram should be.
The only way to know if this would help break BitShares out of Altcoin Purgatory is to run the experiment.