In order to bootstrap a currency you need the price factor to interest lay people and generate adoption. There is no other way. I haven't seen the argument lately, but in the early days when the price started to rise, there was a lot of complaining from people who wanted the price to be stable.

Stability is boring. It doesn't garner attention. It's the high fluctuations that generate interest and bring in new people to the ecosystem.

Without it, Bitcoin would have been basically another technology that most people would have never heard of.