Could not possibly agree more.  Maybe after I graduate from college, have a house of my own, and have a stable job I'll invest in a mammoth bookshelf to store tons of HD discs on, but until then they just take up too much space. 

I even went so far as to throw out all my 360 game cases, and I just store the discs in a cd case.  It's just too big of a pain in the ass when you have to move all your stuff, all by yourself.

@OP

the articles you quoted are full of fail for just 1 reason

"why the 30 percent increases during the two weeks before (combined) went unnoticed"
"up 300 percent year-on-year from 2007"

they compare a 1 week story by a 2 week and 1 year to make it look irrelevant, hence showing a strong bias in favor of BR with their analysis.

Sure the point is valid that BR is increasing in market share and that 1 week doesn't change much, but that is not what the whole story was about. It's about the fact that as a new platform introduced to take over the old one's role, there should be no hickups for it to gain territory over DVD, and any hickups (especially of this magnitude) is a strong sign of weakness in the format's progress.

Or the article is cherry picking...anything can go up or down on a weekly basis. Just look at vgchartz and the different gaming systems...what does the source look at for platform growth? Year over year. So are you saying that if a console goes up and down because of releases but in general is up over the previous year, then is that a failure? No. But you opinion is, and you obviously hate bluray because you are a xbox fanboy, so I don't even count your opinion.

Blu-Ray is still going strong. Maybe the Dark Knight will be Blu-Ray's the Matrix, ie the first title on the format to sell a million week one. I know I'll be buying it. :D

As with DVD and other formats before, HW and SW sales help each other synergistically, while market saturation later dampen growth, you always have a more or less irregular sigmoid-like function, what may change is a dilatation or shrinking along time of the function, but the trend is similar, unless dilatation is so big that obsolescence kills the format before it can really take off. But with only a small percentage of the world population with access to connectivity faster than 56kbps and an even smaller part with more than 7Mbps, the only competitor to BD could be not HD contents download, but a physical format faster and with higher capacity than BD, although starting from scratch, it would have even more difficulty than BD to take off and an even smaller time slice before contents download really becomes a viable alternative for everybody.
Contents download will eventually become dominant, but it will take at least 10 years to reach the majority of world population, so there is still room for BD and perhaps even for another optical media format after it, before it happens, before there will be coexistence. Asymmetric connection, 56kbps upload, satellite 20+Mbps download? Be serious, it would be good only for non interactive contents download but it has and will always have horrible latence and it would suck for interactive uses. Anti-digital divide ADSL? Telcos only grant 512kbps and only to a fraction of households not reached by wider band, more than enough for comfortable browsing, quite feasible, although not very fast, SD download, but not enough for HD contents download.

blu-ray = pwnsickle

I think you have forgotten the main competitor Blu Ray has to overcome.  It has a much lower capacity than BD.  It's name is the mighty DVD.

^^

I didn't forget DVD: its' just that BD HW and media will happen to become cheap right when HD TV will become affordable, this will boost appeal for HD contents. Cheap BD-R/RE drives for PCs will help too, just like they helped DVD and modified consumer electronics too, as we know that home production of DIVX DVD+-R and CD-R discs forced producers to make stand-alone players compatible with a data format that in the beginning didn't even exist and after was strongly opposed by the majors, just like mp3. Anyway, BD success is strongly tied to HD success, I understand your objection, but I never denied it. Right now DVD is almost at the zenith of its third capital achievement: first was players' success, second was DVD+-R for PC's success, third is stand-alone recorders success, that is definitively pensioning off VHS for domestic recording. But VHS too became commodity, with prices dropping under $/€100 when DVD became the most successful player, but wasn't yet an affordable recorder. History is repeating. As for me, I have had a DVD-R on my PC for years, but in the living room I still record on VHS and I still haven't any BD device, my next purchase will be a DVD recorder with HDD, next will be a BD-R for the PC, but only when it will be under €80. And right now I'm not planning to buy a PS3, while I think I'll buy a Wii when it will be under €130, just to say that while I prefer Sony to MS, I'm not a fanboy of either.

I can't see HD movies really taking off for at least another 5 years.

The studios are behind it for reasons that have nothing to do with consumer interests (DRM) or even sales (most of them were on board when its sales were nothing or almost nothing).

Which isn't to say I think its going to fail; in fact I don't even think it has to do much better to be a success. I think the potential that blu-ray has for making pirates lives a little harder will make the studios pull the plug on DVD the same way they pulled the plug on VHS. (for those of you who don't remember, Christmas 2003 has the best sales ever for VHS movies - far greater than  DVD - and then spring 2004 every major studio announced they would stop releasing movies on VHS)