The iPhone sold 1,000,000 iPhones in the first 90 days.Arguing with Kuo and market realities is how smart people successfully predicted the rise of personal computers and cellphones when the world said they didn't want them. Steve Jobs said in the past that you need to bet against what consumers say they want and produce products that they don't yet know they want.
All the 'evidence' you provide is the same evidence you'd see from every successful hardware market today, if we were to look into their early days with their own growing pains.
PCs used to sit on store shelves; years would go by without people buying them. They'd collect dust in homes; people couldn't figure out how to use them, or couldn't see any usecases.
Oculus has 300,000 TOTAL LIFETIME
Smartphones were popular before the iPhone, it was a proven market. Apple just entered it with a revolutionary interface.
Same with computers. They existed before Apple. Intel introduced the first commercial CPU, the 4004, in 1971. April 1, 1976 is Apple's incorporation date.
Home computing was a hobby when Steve Wozniak entered a contest to create a computer with the fewest transistors. When he won, his friend Steve Jobs got the idea to sell them and thus Apple was born.
AR/VR has had some sort of market existence since the 1970s, and became a science fiction trope in the 1980s thanks to VPL Research. Tons of 1980s movies, including Tron, introduced the public to VR. Hell, 3D glasses with movies and TV and theme parks are themselves an analogue form of VR.
Nintendo is the only company to achieve any real market "success" with its Virtual Boy before the 2010s, when the technology was finally advanced enough.
VR is not some new idea, tracing its roots in some technicalities to the 1950s when people described a computer a virtual mathematician.
Smartphones were already a huge industry when Apple and Google jumped in 2007/2008 with iPhonesOS and Android. And a GUI on a computer or smartphone is already a virtual reality interface, simulating originally the work desktop and now a basic old fashioned Snack/Soda machine with widget/button interfaces or restaurant with Menu.
So, to say that VR is a nascent industry is not only uneducated, it is also incorrect.
There is a reason why Virtual Boy failed. It was not the lack of software, etc. The Mac/iPhone/iPad spent a few years of their lives growing software libraries. It didn't sell because of the Modus Operandi (Use Case). People like VR in movies because it looks cool, but as soon as the heavy helmet/cap is attached and the I/O Interface Operators are acquired, it feels cumbersome, bulky, uncomfortable and has a terrible inconvenience to their use.
Also, battery life is a severe issue as the device has to power multiple screens and computations to achieve Use Case. And to add insult to injury, almost all of the I/O in VR is analogue in some cases (moving body, limbs) where a digital and far superior I/O experience has been perfected in the handheld remote controller and Television going back to Pong and Atari. And the Mouse and Keyboard are far superior as well as Virtual Operators to move a cursor and achieve pinpoint precision in language use and targeting Objects in the OS.
Most people will read the reviews that Pogue and various others will eventually write that at the price point asked for, it's DOA. And even at a more affordable price, it is redundant as all of its features and uses can be done far more conveniently in the palm of your hand.