No..."proper mining"... If you call 3 or 4 hard forks over just a few years and changing monetary policy and adding tail emissions as "proper" mining, you don't know enough about monero , or you're being swindled by a privacy narrative.

I am in Bitcoin for 15 years and Monero for 10 years. I am quite familiar with both. Chances are I know a shitload more about both than you do.

Monero added tail emission in 2015, after being live for less than one year. Theres nothing wrong with consensus hard forks.

Haven't used Monero in a while. How do you spend Monero daily? I can't think of a place that accepts Monero? Are you using some intermediate service to use it? Would be interested in setting up Monero payments for my nostr relay...

I am in Bitcoin for 15 years meaning I started to spend it very early on. For a couple of years I expanded my network to Monero, so now I pay nearly 100% in Monero. Where not possible I exchange for LN or other accepted shitcoins on the spot. There are also proxy services that van you get basically anything legal. Then there are DNM for everything else. My experience from VPS, VPN, email services, giftcard shops, online shops is that whenever Monero is accepted it dominates the business which is kinda weird for such a "small" crypyocurrency. So my advice is. Just add it and people will come. You are then free yo exchange it to BTC at anytime if you believe it'l outperform over the long run. Monero's perceived tinieness is probably a result of years of price suppression and recently delistings that no other coin had to face. The community in my opinion is the third largest behind BTC and ETH which one can see when looking at node charts. It has the second most nodes of all chains only little less than BTC.