You don't think its current status has something to do with all the energy put into it early on?
Also, I think you're a little breezy about the threat AIDS poses. It's still killing 2m people a year, down from 3m at its peak.
Talk about hindsight fallacy. "Nowadays" is hardly the point; at the time, depending on what circles you moved in (or perhaps one should say, which classes of human beings you cared about), AIDS was devastating.
The cultural losses were especially incalculable. So many artists at the height of their powers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hGpjsgquqw
While that's still an order of magnitude above "lightning strike" it's below, say, Hepatitis C or many hundreds of other diseases that get less press.