Most fundamental technologies take 30 or 40 years to commercialize, if you look at everything from flat screen TVs to digital cameras. The height of the .com bubble was 30 years after the invention of the Internet, and most .com companies didn't actually become profitable until another ten years after that.

I figured they'd have done X-ray etching long before now, but somehow they squeezed a lot of life out of UV.

My understanding is that with X-ray etching/lithography it's significantly more difficult to produce the coherent beam and also to do the focusing of it through a masking plate so you can etch a whole wafer at one time. That's the main reason that they've been working on EUV because they can produce a coherent pulse and focus it more easily. For X-rays you have to turn it into a diffraction grating to make the mask and that ends up more difficult to produce (probably not impossible but much more difficult).