The meme was certainly what gave it legs initially - but by itself wouldn't have been enough. Being open-source and community supported (not corporate in origin or organization) means there's a decent community around it too - a generally positive and accepting community that isn't just focused on getting rich like so many other crypto communities (tho obviously, it'd be nice to get rich! Just would be good to get there in the right way). Being inflationary puts a focus on transactions - Dogecoin isn't ideal as a long term store of value, because that value forever drops. If you have doge, the best thing you can do with them (short term market fluctuations and speculation aside) is to spend them, and if you don't have (enough?) doge the best thing you can do is earn them. That keeps the community incentivised to keep itself healthy, to expand the community, and to keep and grow ties between community members.
Obviously no one is a fortune teller. The increased acceptance by more notable companies of doge, even if only for small things, brings visibility and shows the coin is a viable transactional medium. I think/hope we'll see a growing acceptance of dogecoin by storefronts small and large going forwards, which should help stabilize the currency and bring more folks with the same cooperative community attitudes in.
As far as anyone can tell, the Proof of Stake is simply an idea being floated right now. Part of the motivation appears to be political risk.
In the absence of some kind of global PoW ban, a move to PoS would functionally be a hard fork - there'd likely be people wanting to stick to a PoW implementation and people wanting to move to the PoS implementation. There are many strong feelings by community members in both directions - myself included. There are a lot of folks concerned about the impact PoS would have on the incentive structures around dogecoin and the type of investors it would attract, as well as around concentrations of wealth and security. There's regulatory concerns too. Personally I think a PoW/PoS fork/split would be a harmful split to the coin and the community, but we'll see what happens moving forward.
It's quite fun. There's memes, there's a mutual supportiveness, there's a growing, healthy economy around it, it's a great group of folks to interact with
I'm not sure doge suffers from a lack of use cases honestly. It's a currency - it's quite good at being that. It isn't trying to be an all-purpose blockchain for every conceivable use-case, nor should it be. Being merely a crypto currency keeps dogecoin out of most of the financial regulation risk too as it's just an asset being mined and traded. Even if it initially had no use case beyond being a funny meme, it has found its purpose, it is carving its niche out in the world, and doing so quite successfully despite those detractors.
