I have been following this quite a bit, and this could still take a very long time.

It is bad news for Ripple in the end regardless, because during this whole period all those other blockchain companies have time to get competing infrastructures in the air.

However, what is quite interesting is that XRP traffic is at all time highs nevertheless, because the number of custom tokens on it has exploded recently. It's not too dissimilar to the Hive Engine in that actually (although HE has much more features for these tokens).