QC can't be developed past a fizzled-out tinker-toy if there's nobody willing to pay for it (there's a finite amount of VC out there, and they all want to believe there'll be returns before they die). There's nobody to pay for it if there's no viable commercial market. There's no viable commercial market if they can't even conceive of a business model.

(The government would fund QC for cryptography, sure, but meeting those requirements is many orders easier and cheaper than getting a generalized QC of the kind everyone's excited about.)