No child knows or cares what goes into Chicken Fingers, but their parents sure care when the price doubles. What does Quorn need to compete with existing heavily subsidized processes in US agribusiness that have a much larger ethical footprint and which are supposedly less efficient at producing protein?
It really does feel like the only way to make a dint is to either wait for prices to raise so much that even the subsidies don't save the industry or they just remove the subsidies altogether. I suspect the latter is not likely anytime soon.
I expect that we'll gradually adjust to eating less meat and enjoying more vegetables, without resorting to made-in-a-factory meat substitutes. That scenario seems much healthier than some sort of fungus-meat-analogue dystopia, personally.
Personally, as a vegetarian for over three decades, I have sometimes been grossed out by realistic meat substitutes, but sometimes found them palatable and even appealing. Just a few days ago I ate a mock meat sandwich from The Butcher's Son in Berkeley that I enjoyed quite a bit (even though it's not very similar to anything I would normally eat most of the time).
I suspect this question is pretty complicated and varies a lot from place to place, person to person, and time to time. For instance, it might be different for people who associated meat with celebrations and feasts and then gave it up somewhat reluctantly, and for people who found meat unpleasant and unappetizing and always preferred eating other things. These two people would naturally have different cultural and emotional associations to the act of eating (something that seems quite a lot like) meat.
So I'd encourage people working in the vegetarian food industry to pursue both tracks: make mock meats that are more and more realistic, and also show people that things that are not very meat-like at all can be appealing and interesting to eat.
Besides, meat substitutes have a long tradition; where I live, mock meat has been in Buddhist cuisine and this has been a tradition prior to the Western trends towards vegetarianism.
> why go through the extra trouble to make the food taste like something it isn't?
...because meat tastes a lot better is why, and is often more protein-, fat- and calorie-dense. Vegetables are pretty boring to me at least.
> fungus-meat-analogue dystopia
Branding a meat substitute as 'dystopian' makes your comment idiotic.