My POV is that "lack of imagination" has too harsh a vibe, although in its consequences I suppose it's pretty true.

My framing would be that the world is complicated, getting more complicated all the time, and to deal with that, people develop only the abstractions needed to navigate it. When new stuff pops onto the scene, they don't have the necessary abstractions to make sense of it, and it takes a while to develop them.

If a person has a clearly felt need, she'll develop those intuitions / abstractions more quickly, but it's less because she's a creative genius, and more because need allows those things to be perceived and internalized much more quickly than without it.

This is why the cypherpunks were so quick to bitcoin, while even the Austrian-types are still way behind, and normies even further behind them, unless they've dealt with a few waves of hyperinflation.