It's difficult to see mass adoption of Bitcoin from a purely store-of-value use case because most people don't (directly) own gold and probably don't think about hedging against inflation.
I'd argue instead that the main use case is to buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin anywhere in the world without having to deal with fees and red tape.
So using your analogy of evolution, transaction scaling is probably going to be the biggest driver of who gets to be at the top of the crypto food chain.
