Why does there have to be large scale production use while it's in beta? Bitcoin's genesis block was mined in 2009, but it took years for it to come out of "beta" and see production adoption.

Ethereum adoption actually is already outpacing Bitcoin's adoption. Ethereum has only been live since July of this year, and already has seen adoption by numerous corporations (even if it's largely development projects at this point).

For example Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service runs Ethereum. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ethereum-blockchain-a...

And here's a large test run conducted with 11 Banks across the globe:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banks-distributed-le...