we missed few trains.
1. At the beggining of bitshares 2.0, just after lunch, there were no bridges and gateways. The only way of step into bitshares exchange was to use another one.
2. Fees were to high, and discourage people from experimenting
3. There were no public testnet, so people have limited possibilities to reports many annoying bugs. Everything were very unstable.
4. Liquidity (if we had any) dropped even harder, and we cannot recover it since then
and as you can guess, this is not everything.
However, since September, a lot of things changed. It is still not perfect, but I believe, we all see bright future for bitshares. I believe, that we evolved as a community.