I don't see how those numbers, even if correct, mean that I'm being too pessimistic about Esperanto. I didn't deny that some people speak it, or that it's easy to learn. I said I don't see any plausible pathway by which it becomes widely enough used to be a lingua franca.

The most interesting of those figures is the one about how many hours it takes to learn various languages. The link you gave doesn't offer any direct support for the startling claim you make (apparently saying that Esperanto is 10x easier to learn than English); rather, it quotes someone else describing a study apparently done by the University of Paderborn's Institute of Pedagogic Cybernetics. (On French students, so part of what this is measuring is similarity to French; that will no doubt be why German is alleged to be harder than English. I remark that Esperanto is more like French than English is -- though probably not more like French than Italian is.) Unfortunately I can't readily track down more information about this (it's cited in an article by Flochon in a book by Guy Gauthier but, at least as quoted in the Grin report, doesn't give any specifics about the study). I would want to know more before believing that the ratio is so very large.