If an opinion from a newcomer is useful, I'm not so obsessed about how popular Smalltalk is.
I came to Smalltalk because a friend of mine (Rafa Luque) was enthusiastic about it, and suggested me to try it.
The candy was not to build applications faster, but to think differently, to question what and how we approach problems with mainstream, industry "best practice" technologies and languages.
I see Smalltalk more like what security researches think of their discipline: it's a process, not a list of tools or recipes. After almost two decades of developing commercial software for others and open-source projects (mainly) for myself, using mostly Java but also Lisp, Smalltalk has blown my mind. That wouldn't have happened if I'd tried Seaside just because I wanted to try a different web framework.
In my case, to approach Smalltalk I needed a certain state of mind. You have to be aware programming is not memorizing design patterns and pay for an IDE to do most things for you, including to check for non-functional stuff nobody seems to care about. We're in the "i'm proud to be lazy" era. I've seen smart people reject Smalltalk just because they don't seem to care about what they do, or at least they don't want to invest their time and energy.
Probably there's a way to convert Pharo in node.js or Go, to make people use Seaside instead of ruby on rails. More people potentially means more financial support, and a better, sooner, full-featured, Pharo.
But even then, Smalltalk empowers people to think differently and gives the means to do so, and to promote that has to tackled differently.