I've got a Lytro, and haven't used it for years, for many of the reasons you articulate.

To my mind their mistake was not having an open source library that could work with their capture format, including basic support for focusing and producing an output image for display.

Pretty much every new photography tech has had a community of amateurs and professionals spring up around it and (hopefully) innovate.

They missed out on that; all we got was the fun-for-a-few-minutes clicking around thing, which gets old pretty fast.