In his book
Zero to One Peter Thiel gives one advice that might be useful for Bitshares:
start small and monopolize.
This means that a startup business should try to find a small audience that it can serve really well. Paypal did this with eBay powersellers – people who were selling lots of stuff on eBay. After three months of dedicated effort, 25 % of them were Paypal users. Before Paypal the payment processing of eBay deals was really a pain in the ass, so it made a big difference and it wasn't that hard to acquire new active users. Of course, when the sellers were using Paypal, also the buyers started to use it.
Can we find the poweruser group for Bitshares? Are there people who would greatly benefit from our services? If we find that group, devs should let them be the top priority for a while. After we have the initial traction, we can start to scale up and concentrate on other users/markets.