I agree, Bitcoin being the largest has a lot of issues with governance and the community not being able to move fast on the scaling issues. I'm not too familiar with the core team's development plans but there's a lot of scaling work and research going on with Ethereum and Litecoin, etc and eventually I'm sure whatever works would flow into Bitcoin as well.

I think having the first-mover advantage and name recognition, the network effect that it has right now and the global media's attention, it looks really difficult for a smaller coin with better tech overtaking BTC anytime soon.

We've all seen technologies that are more advanced than an established player in a field but a lot of times, that does not matter. That's what I believe at least for the short to mid-term timeline.