No one knows anything about Dragon Quest except, maybe, the name. There is really nothing about it that makes any kind of splash. It's easy to miss and easy to skip over. If you look at what happened with Final Fantasy, it didn't blow up huge until it starting pushing image and style above all else. Every 12 year old kid in the world thought Cloud and Sephiroth were COOL. It had incredible cutscenes that looked amazing in TV commercials. Likewise, Persona is incredibly stylish and unique.
Really, most people in the west don't like JRPGs. A massive portion of the people who buy Final Fantasy don't even like JRPGs. They buy it because they're used to buying it and they want to complain that no one is cooler than Cloud. They don't actively go out and look for JRPGs, the publishers and developers have to make them interested. That would probably mean changing Dragon Quest, so it's probably best if they don't.
