As a future small merchant (hopefully) I think at least a service that ties payments to a customer ID is needed to get FTC accepted by merchants. Explaining the customer where he finds the transaction ID, how to copy it to a form and send it, together with his email address or customer ID, and that it will take some time till the payment is manually verified is not really a solution that will be welcomed.
Something like a Bitpay for FTC, even without exchange capabilities, would be great. Or something like paypal. A service that ties a online wallet or payment to a email address.
To get more people into mining a “Mining for Dummies†tutorial would be needed. I think most here underestimate their own knowledge. I´m working with PC since PC-DOS. I have seen a DOS prompt before, know what command line parameters are and how they work. Still, it caused me some headache to get cgminer to work or to set up my first solo mining. Most people today never heard of a batch job, they are used to click and play. A lot of them even are not able to update their video drivers without a step by step guide. Maybe a official pool with a pre-configured software package would be helpful or a GUI for cgminer that shows hash rate and accepted shares with fancy progress bars instead of displaying boring numbers.
Some thoughts about the adult industry (I used to work as affiliate): Most porn webmasters are surprisingly conservative. Even after some of the bigger ones, like MetArt, successfully adopted Bitcoin they go postal explaining why Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies) are evil and must fail. Was really surprising to me because the censorship and ripoff by banksters and CC companies already reached the level of insanity so I see cryptocurrencies as a real chance. Especially for those that worked small (of course legal) niches that have been shut down by CC companies like “drunk sex†for instance. My area is more Sci-Fi / fantasy / tentacle stuff and it turned out as impossible to get 3rd party processing for that, therefore my bet is on cryptocurrencies.