For me I tend to lurk around this forum less frequent than I used to. I've not used my EasyPIC5 board to program PICs via PB Pro for a few years now. The last project I worked on (hobby project) was Arduino based because it had readily available library files that suited the modern hardware (TFT screens) I wanted to use. Yes I too found I was spending more time sorting out syntac errors and typos etc, and the structure seemed alien after using basic for so many years, but everything in life is swings and roundabouts. Yes if funds permitted upgrading to PB3 which might have made things easier, but my personal circumstances has meant that I've never been able to justify the upgrade cost which would have included a new EasyPIC board to support modern PICs to make use of the functions PB3 offer.

There was a similar thread http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=21146 I started a couple of years back and since then I've noticed less and less posts on the forum. I'm guessing that with more and more one board computers coming out that offer far more than an Arduino or a basic PIC people are moving away from the whole project development side of things, where PCBs are designed and built around the PIC, which for me was all part of the fun.

I would agree that it's the people that make this forum, and sadly more and more of the core experienced members have moved away. The loss of DT impacted the forum immensely, and may have been the turning point for the decline. His library of include files filling the gaps left in PBPro and making things a lot more easy to use and efficient. Only a handful of old members still regularly post (Richard, Henrik, Ioannis etc) and should they frequent the forum less and less then the forum will simply gather cobwebs as an archive.

Its a shame things have got in this situation as BASIC is for a lot of people easy to pick up and understand, but IMO PBP has slipped in to decline and has now been left behind. Before Arduino became as main stream as it is now, MikroElectronika was PBP main competition, and they continue to support new hardware both physically through their main development boards and add on modules, but also in their compilers. PBP was slow to follow suit and as mentioned, been left way behind to a point now where it is too costly to catch up.

Anyway, that's my take on things....