Socionics isn't pop psychology, because it's not "pop", if it was pop psychology, you could get a degree write a book, get some reader, etc.

Plenty of pop psychology out there have a vastly bigger audience then socionics, See "the secret".

If socionics was trying to be a pop psychology, it could develop a marketing mechanism that could simply sell it and promote it without any regard to its effectiveness or truth, and likely it has the capacity to be somewhat successful because people seem to dig this stuff. Socionics is too complicated, relies on concepts like information processing and does not provide much of a payoff except maybe duality and the ability to determine the quality of relationships some of the time. It's not a get rich or whatever you want in life scheme, it's far more ambivalent about the possibility of success.

I find socionics interesting because it converges with what I've learned in computer science and physics and provides a adequate explanation for the emergence of the mind and a general model for the variation that has arose in information preference between different individuals.

Ultimately what socionics needs is not promotion, although that is useful, it needs a objective mechanism to differentiate and categorize individuals. One that does not rely on self-reporting(about one's type) but one which does rely on the information reported by the individual(speech acts, communicative acts). We live in a era of dramatic changes in computing, and this is a study that can be aided greatly by the technology we currently have. It is here a somewhat objective mechanism can be found, although likely not the only mechanism. The technology is being used today by the biggest corporations in the world, and if you have a knowledge of this technology as well as the ability to design and create these systems, your opportunities are very lucrative. Unfortunately there may be a few million people in the world with knowledge of the basics concerning this technology, with likely less then 100,000 individuals(maybe even far less) capable of developing such a system. Unfortunately I'm not one of them but I hope to acquire this knowledge and I've found most people either don't know, don't care or don't have the capacity to gain this level of expertise.

This is not easy.