At this point the transaction costs are making it unusable for most regular payments as well.

I sent my friends 50 bucks worth of BTC for christmas time. At that point the fees for regular tx were ~5 bucks so I just bundled them and payed less than a dollar per send, making sure to send the change into a segwit address. I missed someone so I went ahead and sent a one off from a segwit address. That was only 1 buck tx fee. Totally doable for a $50 tx.

But if the valuations are anywhere close to proper we need to have significantly higher throughput.

If I can't send someone 10 bucks on bitcoin it loses a lot of value for me. I've previously used it to pay for lunch/poker w/e when I don't have my wallet and someone that I am with is interested in it. Even litecoin is hitting 1 USD avg tx fee.

Absolutely true. However, if crypto doesn't scale one way or another, it's use case is _greatly_ diminished.