You're not missing a thing. Bitcoin is sound in theory. In practice, though, humans are very flawed and they tend to submit to authority more than is healthy. In the case of Bitcoin in particular, the Core implementation has been declared the de facto reference client. Meaning, whatever they say goes. This has proven to be detrimental to Bitcoin as Blockstream, a private corporation is the employer of (or was cofounded by) the most influential Core contributors. Those who disagreed with the direction Blockstream wanted to steer the project to, were removed from their authority position. Now as a result, Bitcoin is unable to scale. Blockstream keeps delaying a simple upgrade that would do just that and at the same time, keeps pushing competing solutions like LN and Liquid. I think Bitcoin as an experiment in human behavior was very interesting. But as a revolutionary technology, not that successful...