This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace.
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.