Clearly a sensible and doable approach to the development of affordable access to the Moon and the establishment of a permanent presence there. The biggest hurdle is less technical than it is political. The COTS program got its requested annual funding because it dealt only with cargo, making it appear as no big threat to the Constellation crew projects or later to SLS/Orion. On the other hand, the COTS-D crew phase went nowhere and CCP was underfunded significantly early on and is still regularly attacked in Congress as seen just last week.

Perhaps a way around a similar attitude in Congress towards a commercial lunar program is to sell lunar COTS as being focused solely on getting regular deliveries of hardware, rovers, supplies, etc to the lunar surface. Crews will come later via some future SLS/Orion/Lander dream system. I think this has a fighting chance of getting through Congress. Of course, by the time such lunar cargo services are available, there are likely to be commercial options for sending people to the lunar base.

"Each time there were people who claimed that these things were going to have major effects changing how we do space. And then they went away."

Again, this is simply false. Bigelow's habitats have in fact changed the way "we do space", if "we" includes those who design deep space mission architectures. And Bigelow's habitats obviously did not go away.

"Instead, what we have gotten is a small test module funded by NASA that will fly to the ISS by late 2015."

It's actually quite sizable physically and it is gigantic in significance as the first commercial module attached to the ISS. And it is significant that it cost at least 100 times less than what it would have cost NASA to develop, build, and install a similar "small test module" to the ISS.

NASA's official post-ISS LEO policy now depends entirely on commercial space stations. This would not be the case if Bigelow was not seen as a viable provider of such stations. And Bigelow stations would not be seen as viable without the success of those Genesis modules.

You link to timelines I did as fun exercises in speculation and are all full of caveats about the perils of predicting the future. Furthermore, in each one I critiqued what did and did not happen as given in the previous timeline. Ignoring all that and referring to these speculations as hype reminds me that I've considered promoting the word "crype" for empty criticism.

For example, referring to any speculation that does not happen exactly within the time frame predicted as hype is a bunch of crype.

Development time has always been the free variable in the entrepreneurial space approach. The goal is to develop space hardware at low cost and to operate it at low cost. Achieving that for such complex systems invariably involves an incremental, step-by-step process and that typically means time slips. (That's especially true where one system depends on the availability of another system as, for example, Bigelow depends on the development of commercial crew launchers.) But taking longer than hoped is a trivial matter if the goal of low cost is achieved and "traditional aerospace development" costs are avoided.

What will be remembered about this era in commercial space development won't be the fits and starts and delays and disappointments. What will be remembered will be the success by entrepreneurs in proving that drastically lower costs could be obtained for space access and for in-space infrastructure. This will have been accomplished despite the near unanimous view in mainstream aerospace industry, think tanks, and academia for most of this period that it was impossible to achieve such cost reductions. I'm sure, though, that the institutional memory of these institutions will forget that part of what happened.

". Who else remembers all the hype around Bigelow Aerospace back in 2006/7?"

A Bigelow module is going to the ISS on a private space transport this fall. And it's costing NASA all of $16M. Most any deep space human mission architecture today from NASA or anyone else includes Bigelow or similar expandable structures as either an alternative or the primary habitat design. So neither Bigelow nor expandable modules "went away".
Even the Genesis modules are still there. Mike Gold recently said they are proving that their habitats can remain airtight for decades.

Bigelow did scale back to wait for development of transports that can take people to his stations. He is now scaling up his workforce in expectation of using such transport services in a couple of years.

I was reporting on the Genesis missions at the time and I remarked then on how little attention they were getting despite proving a significant new technology. I do remember around that time that a Spanish based space station "project" (Galactic Suite) with no hardware or funding got a huge amount of media attention during a slow August news month. That was the sort of thing the word "hype" was meant for. By stretching it to include Bigelow's successful orbiting of two unique vehicles that successfully proved an important new capability, it becomes simply a useless insult meaning no more than "it didn't impress me".

Regarding institutional memory, yes it is always good to learn from past mistakes and successes. This is true, though, for everybody, not just space entrepreneurs. It's safe to say that virtually everyone in mainstream aerospace industry and academia would have stated as an absolute fact in 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) that there was no way that the cost of an expendable launch vehicle launch could be reduced in cost by a factor of 2-3. Perhaps if their institutional memory had remembered how projects like Bigelow's Genesis modules, the DC-X, Lunar Prospector, Giove-A, etc successfully achieved huge reductions in costs compared to their cost models, the low cost of the F9 would not have been such a surprise.

From all the meetings (like H2M last week) and studies of NASA's deep space prospects by various distinguished groups that I've seen, it appears that most people in mainstream aerospace still "blithely ignore" the demonstrations of lower cost space development happening right in front of the them. ULA and Arianespace/ESA are exceptions because economic reality is forcing them to deal with it.

Yes, yes, you are going to point to the slow sRLV development and our bet. Multiple approaches to a problem by multiple organizations is a key strength of commercial tech development. That means there is a good chance at least one will get it right. But it happens sometimes that none do. Each of the sRLV projects either had a key shortcoming (e.g. a bad design with Rocketplane, a lack of money by XCOR, a bad propulsion choice by VG) or was in no big rush (i.e. Blue) that kept them from reaching space by now. It was not due to a deep fundamental flaw seen only by critics. A decision by VG to go with SS1.5 or a billionaire angel flying into the XCOR hanger or Bezos making it a top priority to get to space ASAP, then the sRLV story would be quite different.

Luck like this does play role. SpaceX came within a whisker of disappearing in 2008. If the company had in fact gone down, then there would be no end to the grand proclamations of how yet another arrogant mogul learned the hard truth that space is hard and big reductions in costs cannot be achieved. The serious aerospace guys would have lowered costs already if that were possible...