Some general thoughts:
1. I agree that it's cumbersome to set up and you have to want to go into "let's play some VR now" mentality. To me that makes it pretty imperative that whatever it is I'm doing has to actually be compelling. Playing any sort of online games where you're locked into a match with someone for 15-20+ minutes (like Pokemon TCGO for instance) also has a big "must block off this amount of time" cost, so I don't think that's a killer all by itself.
2. If this turns out to be a fad that passes, then I'll be sad but it's not the end of the world, just to clarify things if anyone was wondering. I've invested less in VR than I would have to for a single PS4 or Wii U dev kit, for example, which is hilarious. That said, right now there are a number of people who come into this and go "games aren't different enough from normal to warrant the hassle," and that's exactly the sort of person I want to excite. I kinda fall into that camp myself; there are some amazing experiences, and pieces of some amazing games, and there are some amazing games that are short (like SUPERHOT), but there's nothing to long-term keep me coming back to one game over and over again for weeks or months.
3. In terms of the gimmicky-ness of it, I think that's something that for most people gets dispelled when they either try the Oculus Touch or the Vive with the controllers. Without the motion controls it is definitely a gimmick. And if you're just trying out the tech demos like The Climb (sorry, I know that's $50 but it will always be a tech demo to me), that really just furthers the feeling of it being a gimmick even if you were using the motion controllers. I seriously can't recommend SUPERHOT VR more in terms of seeing what is actually possible, despite its frustratingly short length. Even there a lot more could be done, though.
4. Worst case, I think this is a good place for me to hide out for a while while the Steam market is in turmoil and unhospitable. I think that thanks to past residuals and the smallness of the market and my particular style, I can make a living here during the next year, and we'll see how things evolve. With indie games, which seemed to be faddish to most people in the 2008 timeframe or so, I happened to be right on the cusp on that when that started in earnest in 2009, and hence Arcen really existing. This has a similar feel, but if that's not how things play out I won't be crestfallen. I still have plenty of non-VR ideas I want to do, too.
5. I think that the comparison to 3D TVs is a bit unfair, mainly because those add next to nothing. Some folks like 3D, but overall it doesn't add anything to the storytelling or much to the immersiveness, and it can actually add a feeling of disconnection to what is happening on the screen, as well as giving people like me headaches after not all that long. With VR, there's a lot of stuff that can frankly only be done there and not in a traditional game, so it's a legitimate new storytelling medium. I think the question is how devs wind up using it; if I hand you a nailgun and you only use it as a blunt object to hammer in nails, and occasionally line it up behind a screw to fire a nail into the back of the screw to get it in by secondary pressure, then a nailgun is a useless gimmick and not worth the hassle and the setup. It kinda feels like a lot of developers are doing that sort of thing with VR. But a nailgun actually is a really amazing tool if you use it properly. 3D TVs are more like a particularly shitty roomba.
6. As far as there being too many headsets right now, I think that competition is a good thing. Not when it causes a segmented market like what you have with the Oculus store exclusives, which sucks. But the Oculus Touch and the Vive are the same price and same overall functionality (similar enough, anyway), and can both be targeted simultaneously pretty well. The playstation one is more of an outlier, but hey it's a console. And things like the Gear VR and whatnot are just too underpowered to be worth much, but they take less setup and cost and are a good "gateway drug" to get people to understand the idea of what VR can be.
7. The price of the Vive and Oculus needs to come down, and I'm sure it will, but right now it doesn't matter too much in my opinion because the price of the PCs that can run them is the bigger factor and those need to come down even more. So we're a few years out from this becoming anything like mainstream, and that's just fine with me. It keeps the biggest fish away from the pond some (they can't afford to develop for such a small audience), and gives folks like me a fighting chance. I'm not saying I intend to make software that will make or break the adoption of VR, but I think that developers with similar flexibility will cumulatively do so. That and large companies that are investing in VR without any hope of immediate positive returns, for whatever reason.
8. In the end, the VR market is attractive to me largely for the same reasons that ultra-hardcore strategy games as a market is/was attractive to me. It's small, underserved by the big guys, a hungry audience, an audience that actually tends to have some money to spend in a reasonable way (versus the freemium things that attract teenagers in large droves), and it's an area I have a personal passion for as well as ideas.
9. For those outside of either market it can have kind of a "Wat?" sort of feel to it in both cases, but people here have always been inside the market (strategy games), so I haven't had to deal with the "wat" factor here when it comes to strategy games. I've had similar discussions about this sort of thing (not faddishness, but just the unviability for many reasons) on other forums (literal and figurative) regarding the type of hardcore strategy games, or strategy games that don't include PVP, etc. People wouldn't shut up about the unviability of non-PVP strategy games for a number of years there, haha.
