I guess the trick to having fruitcake be more popular as a gift item would be to send the fruitcake along with a fifth of something you like to soak it in... a do it yourself project... leaving the option of doing whatever the recipient wants to do with the fruitcake. Re-gifting ?
My wifes family had a genuinely awful fruitcake that got re-gifted for multiple years in a row as a running joke... sans ameliorants.