$5 worth of Bitcoin to make a single transaction using Bitcoin!

Fees will come down with Bitcoin based LN or another network like Ethereum. Give it time this is still early days.

    it is clearly inferior to US Dollars in every way.

This is categorically false. For some tasks US dollars are great but a lot of people are into BTC for the whole decentralized store of value thing. And honestly it does "decentralized trust" pretty well.

    Bitcoin is a scam, block chain is all hype, and everyone involved
    with Cryptomania is going to look silly when the music stops and
    someone has to eat the soggy biscuit.

This is a bit of a leap isn't it?

Here is an idea for your chores, make your own family coin on Ethereum, make an exchange rate that the family pays to the kids, etc.. (1 family coin for $1) then you now have a decentralized home currency that will cost a few cents to move.

Or if you're not interested in a funky project like that, just use Ethereum for now instead of BTC for micro transactions. I regularly pay 5 cents to move money around in Ethereum.

I do believe both BTC and ETH have bright futures.