Replying twice to the same note may not be the best form, but I did want to add that the places where Bitcoin still feels revolutionary are in the privacy protocols being developed like Coinswap and other privacy oriented protocols. And the nice thing is that while these will never be what the powers that be have anything good to say about, they also can't stop it given that it is, at the end of the day, open source code, and it turns out that math is ungovernable.
Rest easy that with enough adoption, you won't need to suffer these circuses of conferences for too long. Nobody holds dollar or gold conventions after all. Privacy conventions could pick up, though getting together to meet in person may be an odd choice for privacy afficionados. Maybe we all need to show up looking like Calle...