The core problem with such reasoning is that to become popular you have to do more than getting on par with other offerings at a later time. Even then, the other offerings will be still be from more popular parties, there will be more stuff to find etc etc.
That is of course assuming you will get on par the first time (we are still working on Delphi compatibility, 20 years after it was decided to pursue it)
I think any big effort should be focussed on people who actually use Lazarus, rather than gunning for big external hordes that never come.
+1
Maybe time has arrived to FPC and Lazarus stop pursuing Delphi compatibility and start making its own path.
Other open source projects have done that before and succeeded, such as Firebird from Interbase, MariaDB from MySQL, LibreOffice from OpenOffice, etc.
I have nothing against implementing in FPC and Lazarus good features from other programming languages and IDEs, including Delphi. Almost all programming languages and IDEs do that.
FPC and Lazarus are already a better solution than Delphi. I know many people and companies here in Brazil that are migrating from old and new versions of Delphi, Clipper, Visual Basic and Visual Fox Pro to Lazarus. In the same way, I hardly hear about people leaving Lazarus in favor of Idera Embarcadero Delphi or Microsoft Visual Studio.
There is no silver bullet, but Lazarus sure is an excellent solution for many needs of many people and many companies.
I still miss FPC and Lazarus being more taught in technical schools, colleges and universities. Mostly, IT students here in Brazil learn Java, C/C++/C# and PHP, not Pascal.