he didnt make it just for fun

he didnt do it to show of a profit.

he did it because he hated th whole government financial status.. (see the quote in the genesis block) thats his inspiraction.

and with less then 0.02% of population using it.. this is not the exiting day to ask such a question, bitcoin is still small.. ask again in a couple years

He worked on it for ten years, released it with a 40-50 year timescale to allow for transaction volume to grow high enough that the fees could support the network.

Did that whitepaper look like it had been somebody getting lucky, or the well planned product of a decades work?

Awap expected for hoped or designed.
Scale up following exponentially from where we are today. This is infancy.

The original thread was 10 years earlier.

Yes of course. Satoshi first started communicating about the project on cypherpunks around 98-99, discussing with Adam Back (hashcash), Wei Dai (b-money), RAH and others.

Check the archives yourself, look for mails from anonymous at replay

I'm not implying anything. Satoshi was online and discussing bitcoin ten years earlier, if you're familiar with his more recent mails from a few years ago, the series of mails to cypherpunks/cryptography back in 98-99 will be familiar, for example this. There are plenty more earlier and later. As Adam Back says those were the discussions when he first started speaking to Satoshi over the internet. Of course he was likely around long before that as you say, as his ideas are already maturing by 99.

And it seems that we are indeed bootstrapped at this point. I would not have said that 3 years ago.

I think Satoshi had high hopes for bitcoin because he knew it works. He believed in it and knew it could be big, but wasn't sure how the public would react. Sometimes innovations fail, not because it was bad design, just bad marketing.

Pretty weak conjecture.  Plenty of people have had ideas about digital currencies involving cryptographic systems over the years.   They weren't all Satoshi and there is nothing in that quote that links to Bitcoin.

Thomas Edison proposed something similar. The idea is not new for sure but combining it with the internet is new and exciting.

I think he was pretty sure bticoin would either succeed or fail, there's no in between

his goal was to defeat the banking system, if i recall correctly. Even the genesis block mocks the bankers.

surely the only way to do that is if bitcoin becomes big, very big, much bigger than it is now.

which would make all of us rich, but that's not the goal, that's just a pleasant side-effect.