OP,
You're onto something with your statement. You are seeing that many, if not most "traders" truly never become successful due to the fact that they don't ever really put 100% into the effort.
Of those that approach trading with proper capitalization, expectations, attitude and intelligence.....
I bet a greater percentage of those people succeed. The hard truth is that most think its an easy way to SURE RICHES. The reality is that its VERY DIFFICULT and TAKES A LOT OF TIME, EFFORT AND ABILITY.
Unfortunately the average human is adverse to those requirements and thus the failure rate. It's like entrepreneurialism, it all sounds good until you really roll up your sleeves and do the work. Hence the reason most would rather just follow all the other lemmings to their assigned cubicles on a daily basis and get what some middle manager feels like awarding them with on a yearly basis.
ET is riddled with true pretenders and very few contenders, you know, not very different from life in general.
Good Luck!