I apologize for the terrifying doom textwall y'all are about to encounter, especially since as of late I've been scarce around this place. As a couple of people have already said, adulthood changes things. I've become a victim of the 30-40 hour retail work week.
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Speaking as one of those aforementioned "oldies", when I got into UTAU, we as a fandom were literally growing alongside the software itself. I mean heck, I started before the UTAU grid scrolled as it played USTs! There were software and plugin updates right and left, and new techniques being developed for recording and otoing and usting all over the place. When something new got tossed to the fandom, you can bet within the week there'd be a tutorial and tests spattered all over YouTube and, later, Tumblr and Soundcloud. All these improvements brought in new fandom members who wanted to jump right into things. UTAU was no longer the scratchy mod-less mess of 2008 but a respectable competitor to Vocaloid. People took notice: LOTS of people. At the same time, our sister software Vocaloid was blossoming into a cultural phenomenon. We had a LOT of material coming out to cover, remix and reimagine: seeing as 99% of us were still just making covers.
Now, UTAU development has slowed down to a crawl. Last year and the year before that, we still had plenty of new resamplers and plugins to play with, like Masao's patcher and the pitch drawing tool and utaugrowl and what have you. Stuff was still happening even though UTAU itself hadn't updated in a year. For the past several months however, that's stopped for the most part. I mean hell, UTAU-Synth is essentially dead now: it hasn't been updated since early 2013, the download link recently broke, and the monthly serial key generator seems to be busted. At the same time, there's cries that the Vocaloid fandom is dying off (though arguably, I don't 100% agree with this, for reasons I might be posting elsewhere later). Either way, though. you can't deny that attitude has spread all over the singthesis crowd (save for maybe the Chipspeech fandom, bless their souls)
I think Jeremy makes a very important and valid point: UTAU has survived, despite Ameya himself being in development limbo, through a series of innovations made by the few. These innovations have subsequently turned into trends and standardized by the majority. When something new and revolutionary gets brought to the table, people flood in, all wanting to be THE FIRST to try it out and master it. Then a trend forms. (I mean, the DAY that Cz announced her VCCV, someone asked me in a YouTube comment if I planned to record VCCV Aiko. This was even before that BalladSoft test was made public!)
However, I think this general attitude of waiting for the Next Big Thing to show itself is dangerous and is, in part, what is causing the general VocUTAU fandom to stagnate as it is. The ratio of people actually innovating to people following innovations has gone off balance due to the sheer amount of users here now, and you can only follow an existing fad upwards for so long before it plateaus. It happened with VCV. It happens with every spam cover. It happened with story-song series. It happened with same-voice types in the V3 era. Too much of something, and people get bored with it because it becomes the norm! It's a fact of life.
(I think this oversaturation of the same-old, same-old is one major reason why many REALLY GOOD current Vocaloid songs go overlooked, and why no one has really caught onto presamp. Let me tell you, if Delta had come along in 2012 with a CVVC plugin that automates everything for you, people would've eaten that shit up. But we're so inundated with powerscale VCV - The Golden Standard - that it just hasn't gotten a foothold.)
There have been lulls before in fandom activity, but not this long or to this extent. But do I think UTAU (or, while on the topic, Vocaloid) will die out? Naw. Not at all. as chunter has pointed out, the fandom has matured. It's settled. It's not the exponentially growing, bustling hive of activity it used to be, but it's still here. We're proof of that! And it's really up to us as members of the fandom to choose whether or not to help push it forward, rather than give up on it because the forum has quieted down or there aren't weekly floods of spam covers of the Breakout Vocaloid Hit Of The Month on SC/YT to prove its ongoing existence.
I'm not saying we all need to learn to program and churn out resamplers, but don't be afraid to break boundaries and collaborate. History has shown us that these avatar singthesizers are made for collaboration, but (again, as it's been brought up) in the overseas crowd, people don't seem too keen to go outside their comfort zone. But with an aging fanbase that's quickly losing its free time, collaboration is the key to being able to turn out interesting, quality works at a decent speed and quantity to keep interest going.
Heck, maybe it's a long shot, but what if we could unify enough to reach out to directly Ameya, thank him, and express that we'd like to see more open development tools available for UTAU and UTAU-Synth to keep things going on the programming side, perhaps?