I don't think there was ever a sustainable route to a semantic web that would work for the masses.

People wanted to write and publish. Only a small portion of people/institutions would have had the resources or appetite to tag factual information on their pages. Most people would have ignored the semantic taxonomies (or just wouldn't have published at all). I guess a small and insular semantic web is better than no semantic web, but I doubt there was a scenario where the web would have been as rich as it actually became, but was also rigidly organized.