Relax, most of this is simply due to the fact people early in life tend to be relatively poor, and with other more pressing needs. I was a total audiophile my whole life long, and yet hardly bought a thing or set foot in a store for a solid 15 years from 1976 until about 1991. If that is me, a dyed in the wool stone cold bona fide audiophile then for sure a lot more less determined are doing something like that. For the same reasons: getting married, finding a house, buying furniture, getting settled in a good job- are all way more important than having some good tunes. So remove the blinders, and relax.
Then if you still want to give serious consideration to the problem of interesting more and sooner, how about we talk a little turkey? Audiophiles are their own worst enemy. Time after time we focus on the equipment. And not all the equipment either but only the big items the retailers push at us.
What we should be doing, if we are serious about getting more people interested, is helping them learn to listen and appreciate whatever music it is that they now are listening to, in whatever format or with whatever equipment. In other words we should stop being an extension of the audio marketing complex and start acting like actual audiophiles.
In this I am not about to hold my breath. It would mean accepting the fact that everything matters. It takes zero money to try and hear the difference between speaker cables on the floor vs elevated above them. To try a book or ball or whatever under a component. There’s dozens of free or nearly free things everyone can try and when you do this you become both a better listener as well as an audiophile with a better system.
But yet when people like myself or mahgister do this we are attacked and mocked and held up to scorn and ridicule. So you want to do something positive? Attack and scorn and BAN the NON-audiophile loser wanna-bees who go after audiophiles for the "crime" of being genuine, sincere, and serious audiophiles.
On that score, cue Col Jessup:
https://youtu.be/5j2F4VcBmeo?t=9