Besides, Low_Profile, aren't you a tad negative? Our visitor count is increasing and increasing (10%+ in January 2k7 compared to last year alone already), newsposts going steady... during the past 30 days alone more than 180 different people posted news, reactions and forum posts... and as for music remakes: Wolf_'s recently released mp3 remakes in the MRC db are being downloaded very often. His Metal Gear 1 remake tops the overall download charts with close to 1,000 downloads. That's unique downloads, not Wolf_ frantically hitting the F5 button I might add. So lack of audience is certainly not an issue.
We're only experiencing less flame wars these days. That's the kind of activity I can easily go without. If that means it'll take 17/18 months to get 25,000 forum posts than 12/13... so be it 
maybe it's just the people i know personally that slowed down in activity then
But i do seem to recall most topics i tracked used to go a lot faster, or is it just my imagination.
Look at the Italo challenge thingy... 3 times postponed deadline, that can't be a good sign can it?
However, a bright note to share: I re-arranged that RNFF intro/title-tune, some weeks ago.. need to finish it. Also, I was already working on a new large-scale rearrange, which will prolly be my most ambitious remake sofar, but I stumbled upon some technical limits of my *new* system already.. quite a bummer. 
(RAM limits due win32, so I'll redo it, in a slightly different way)
what the hell are you using then... 5GB+ piano samples, every note, every velocity a different sample? 
An orchestra. Enough to fill up 1.5Gb mem with starts of samples of 0.20sec each. That 1.5Gb is the limit in XP32.. even tho I have 4Gb mem. Time to investigate Vista eh..
Is it really the limit of XP??? How sad! (Ow, sorry, offtopic...)
Yes, you're glad to have said that, aren't you?
Iirc there's a 3.some Gb limit in XP even using some minor trickery, but it won't help for these samples.