Honestly, a huge part of it is purely economic. The Quest 2 demonstrated that there's a significant market just waiting for an accessible price point, and it's not just that the headset was cheap but also the fact that you didn't need a gaming PC because it has standalone capability. And of course the convenience factor is very important for mass adoption.

Hitting these price points and competing in this niche market is absolutely holding the hardware back immensely. Innovation is more likely to be punished by unrecoverable R&D costs than sticking to tried-and-true repurposed phone screens and such. Meta is hemorrhaging money to gain the market share they have, to the tune of billions of dollars most companies don't have.

It's really up to publicly funded research to push the boundaries. I was hoping to see something revolutionary coming out of DoD research, but they're apparently more interested in flushing money down the drain with dead-ends like Hololens and XTAL. Still, I'm keeping a close eye on some very promising avenues like metamaterial lenses and lightfields. I just don't expect them to achieve the economy of scale necessary to become affordable consumer products any time soon.