I think that now it is just missing manpower, i.e. more developers, or businesses, people interested to invest time, energy and money into Monero based startups, I may be biased but as a dev myself I think of development opportunities all the time that could make it more usable or friendly as a payment method for goods and services, both online and offline, like a btcpayserver alternative focused on Monero, an AI platform where you buy credits with monero, social media like Nostr where donations are made in Monero (I always wanted a video platform like Odysee to achieve this since video creation is a great fit for monetization and subscriber benefits), patreon/locals/subscribestar alternatives paid in Monero, gaming platforms like itchio. But I already have my work so I can't code everything at once

In general I think we just need people using it either for fun, or for actual income, and then it is like a bandwagon effect where it would translate to real life where everyone is like "I can just use Monero" and we may see the market cap in a similar position of the "top popular coins", and where making it illegal is useless 

 the problem I foresee, even if monero becomes popular is that govnts can make it illegal to sell things ie accept payment for monero. You then have the problem of advertising your products legally.  And the whole system collapses, back to the darknet where it currently is.  This is true of all crypto.  Privacy is great, but in the end to actually buy real world goods there is no privacy thats legal. Because the seller must be visible. 

 No crypto is private unless you never want to spend it. 
 In the UK HRMC says crypto investors must declare the following: 

    The type of tokens 
    Date you disposed of them 
    Number of tokens you’ve disposed of 
    Number of tokens you have left 
    Value of the tokens in pound sterling 
    Bank statements and wallet addresses 
    Records of the pooled costs before and after you disposed of them 

That leave you with zero privacy from the govnt, unless you want to break the law.