Telegram's been around close to a year or so now. They are an established mainstream app and they look like an obvious "WhatsApp replacement" if one is looking for one. Far fewer people are looking for a secure IM app per se, so your numbers aren't really that surprising. Regrettably, unwashed gray masses don't give a flying f#ck about quality of the crypto, so TS doing crypto better is not a tangible conversion benefit.
but i found that use it to transparently send sms when needed super confusing to people.
people don't want to use sms. if they did they would just use that instead.
in cyanogenmod it's even more confusing. cyanogenmod integrated it to their base system, but you have no way of knowing if the text message you just sent is really encrypted or not (unless the other party tells you since he's running textsecure), i'm guessing/hoping that'll improve though
Just because you disagree with one datapoint doesn't mean you can't compare them.