You can't drive adoption without scalability and in reality, most
startups (and even blockchains) will be failures if they can't
scale to meet demand.

What demand? How long do you think it will be until the raiblocks transaction count consistently exceeds that even of say, bitcoin?

In the 1980s DOS was not displaced by the many feature-rich operating systems that could address more then 640K of memory. Clearly supporting more memory was a mandatory feature by the early 90s, but it had no relevance early on - and by the time it did Microsoft had cobbled together a (technically inferior, but working) solution.

Looking at history though - you can't find many examples where
the first was actually the surviving protocol/platform.

I would argue it isn't so much being first, as being the first to entrench itself (i.e. via a network effect). The counter examples you provide are situations where VERY compelling
but also urgently demanded features were able to tip the balance.

If the history of software shows us anything - it's that disruption
is king and the product "that just works" is going to be the one that
wins over consumers.

Don't get me wrong, there are some killer features that are desperately needed today that could displace the incumbents - I just don't see raiblocks having any of them. For example, and as the OP contends, a crypto solution that "just works" for grandma and grandpa could become the killer app. If anything bitcoin currently enjoys the most user-friendly position because of its wide-scale support, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

As much as I'd love to believe this (because it'd be a lot easier
to hold BTC/ETH than continually research new technology),
understanding the technical aspects of these products and their
limitations leads me to believe otherwise. This is

I too have a deep technical understanding of the subject matter, but I have come to appreciate how history is littered with failed projects that had the potential to be disruptive but whose technically-minded communities became blinded to the pragmatic issues that eventually decided the course of the market.

My stance right now is that Bitcoin is the AOL of blockchains. It's
about to get disrupted, > maybe not by RaiBlocks specifically, but by
a new generation of software that

It's hard to draw hard parallels since the discord within the Bitcoin community is probably its greatest threat. I do like your comparison however, and note that AOL dominated the space for 25 years until it's eventual decline. Even in crypto-years we're not there yet with Bitcoin.