The end user is the consumer, and the .COM TLD isn't failing them in any perceptible way whatsoever. The higher prices actually serve their needs, because they lend greater credibility to the .COMs. The consumer can trust them more, the consumer can expect greater investment in the product they serve, and the consumer can easily recognize and remember the domain name.
I dare say it would get you laid at parties. even zuckerberg doesn't have mark.com
There are so many new TLDs out there that I couldn't even pick out the real ones from fake ones if you gave me a list. And most of them require no verification whatsoever, so They're completely open to legitimate users and spammers alike.
org doesn't even make sense as "open source", but pretty much every open source project has a .org domain; and since that's what I do, it works well for me.
I'm treating mine like a pseudo-TLD and just spamming out CNAMEs of @ for pet projects.
Of course, it used to be that an end-user could have the shortest possible domains, just like businesses of "$name.com", but now businesses can drop $25,000/yr on ".$name", which regular people obviously can't. Remains to be seen how much those get used, looks more like everyone wants to buy ".$adjective" gTLDs to resell instead so far.