Its seems to me that a decentralized exchange and financial freedom go hand-in-hand... so I think the vision is stronger than ever. Legacy exchanges that are now regulated still carry substantial risks of default. Just because a goxing hasn't occured in a while doesn't mean that is the end of it. Its almost guaranteed to happen again. The custodian model simply does not work and let's not forget the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis. Goxings occured on a very large scale but were masked by bailouts and monetary inflation. Just because losses were socialized doesn't mean that many financial institutions didn't fail. For instance, the bitcoin network could have bailed out mt gox with fake bitcoin created out of thin air (increasing the 21m limit), but that would have worsened the problem by keeping a failed, incompetent exchange alive, just as many zombie fiat banks are still alive because of fake fiat. Bitcoin was a step in the right direction and bitshares is a continuation of that vision and it more directly solves the problem.
I know its easy to get discouraged when prices aren't going anywhere but bitshares has actually outperformed other 2.0 projects (ripple, nxt, stellar) over the past 6 months since the beginning of the summer anouncements. Of course bitshares has lost value to bitcoin which makes it seem worse. We have to realize that this is a process that takes time and the dex is still only worthy of experimental amounts of money at this time. Investors and traders are not going to dump large amounts of money into the exchange all of a sudden. Over time, as users become more and more comfortable with the exchange, bugs are worked out, and the protocol becomes more solid, then users will begin to migrate towards the exchange. After all, its only been a little over a month since launch.