I probably look at it even more in this direction as you. When I jumped into crypto a couple years ago, I was sure it was a scam. Steem was my entry, as I saw an actual use for it. The idea of using Bitcoin as my entry to get into Steem was out of the question as the high transaction fees would eat up a lot of my meager investment.

As I've watched crypto since, it quickly became obvious to me that any real opportunity would be in an alt project that had a use case (Steem now Hive) and could potentially grow that use case to create a demand separate from the pump and dump values most chains only seem to offer. The odds of someone buying into something like Hive for .25 each and it reaching its previous high of 8.00 is more realistic than buying Bitcoin for say 10,000 and it reaching 320,000. Even Cardano, which was as low as .02 not long ago reaching its former high of 1.33 would be an astronomical growth of 65x. Bitcoin to match that at 10k would need to hit 650.000 each.

Plus, in terms of average people as you point out, its easier to own units whose entry value is so much cheaper.