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Handguns exist because of the need for firearms that are small and easy to carry. Otherwise, no one would have invented them and we would only have long guns.
Some of that purely practical consideration is a bit blurred these days by legal definitions, but the bottom line is that handguns were born out of a need for compact, portable, light and potentially concealable firearms.
That places (admittedly vague) top limits on the size and weight of practical/traditional handguns.
People don't have an unlimited tolerance for recoil, so that's another limit--albeit another vague limit.
Recoil is related to performance--in the form of muzzle momentum which is the product of projectile weight and velocity at the muzzle. It's also related to the weight of the handgun by the principle of conservation of momentum.
Modern manufacturing and metallurgy, combined with practical size and weight limitations place top limits on the discharge pressure.
None of that applies so much to the "novelty" handguns like the super-magnum revolver cartridges (e.g. 500S&WMagnum, .454Casull) or handguns designed to shoot rifle cartridges--obviously if you are willing to stretch the size/weight constraints or tolerate really high levels of recoil and rifle pressure levels then you can push the performance limits much higher. What I'm talking about is more directed towards more traditional handguns in terms of size/weight/applications.
In addition, because traditional handgun applications are relatively short range, not all bullet design advantages that have benefited rifle cartridges are especially applicable to handguns.
Anyway, wrap all of that into one big package and the result is not only a practical top limit on the performance of handgun cartridges that are intended for traditional handgun uses, but also a limit that is relatively constant. I think that means that barring some sort of significant technology advances, or perhaps laws that push the basic limits around in some fashion, there's unlikely to be a lot of innovation in terms of new handgun cartridges. The ones we have cover the spectrum of reasonable handgun performance very well and you have to look really hard for gaps that can be filled in by new cartridges.
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