Honestly, I think there's room to be much more popular than we are in the FGC. But for that to happen, we need to stop shooting our own competitive community in the foot.
Like, SF5 shipped in a massively incomplete state, and people were upset about it, but they still came out and supported their scene while being unhappy with the game and meta. No matter how they feel about the state of their game, they will still prop their competitive scene up anyway.
The MK community now seems to have a lot of people who weren't going to play the games seriously anyway, but sit at home and try to discourage others from coming out. If you notice, these people rarely say anything positive about tournaments or actual competitors, and they don't pitch in at all to support anyone or build the scene.
So I think we just need to learn to separate these things, and to be able to criticize constructively rather than destructively. If we intentionally discourage pot monsters from showing up, they won't.