Me. Once upon a time, I was an active RPGer. I've taken part in Shire games (Prisoner of Númenor, Assigned to Mordor (ATM), Island of Sorrow) and I ran Assigned to Mordor II (ATM 2); and I've taken part in Rohan settlements (I was a frequent participant in The White Horse Inn, one of the founding folks of the Eorling Mead Hall, and a regular of the Scarburg Mead Hall (where characters I created are still Very Important, though they've been inherited by others), and I took part in most or all offshoots thereof); and for a time I was an active writer in Gondor's Tapestry of Dreams.
I still lurk as a non-participatory consulting gossip. RPGers with questions shoot me PMs or pounce on me on Facebook, and I like that level of participation: I get to help out, but I don't have to take responsibility.
Now that I've spewed my credentials, here is how I read the situation:
There is one basic Very Big Problem that keeps people from committing to anything:
RPGs take too long.
This is caused in part by (and in return, causes) the secondary Very Big Problem:
Players are unreliable.
Obviously the constraints of everyday life are going to go a long way to determining how often and how much any one writer can contribute, but when most RPGs begin with maybe ten writers, and have an expected time line of two months, and then two years later you've got two writers typing furiously, trying to just finish the stupid story so that they can have some mental closure even though it's turned into a chore instead of anything fun... That's unpleasant.
In all honesty, can we really expect anybody to commit to an ungodly number of years to finish a project?
I think one way to revitalize the RPG forum is to impose a stricter expectation that games will not go on into eternity unless (like the Inns) they are designed to do so. If you say your game is going to be done by December, by Eru it needs to be completed by Thanksgiving.
I submit that this would provide a more manageable expectation. You can't expect players to maintain enthusiasm for a story with no direction or end point. That's like expecting an audience to remain cognizant through a full showing of the movie
Australia.
While subplots are excellent (and typically helpful when it comes to adding nuance and complexity to a story arc), a STORY is:
-a series of related events with a clear beginning, middle, and end, with a defining moment which causes a significant change in the character or characters.
If we can focus (for a time anyway) on simplifying each RPG into a cohesive story with
one solid, identifiable plot line, perhaps outlined with specific plot points as achievable milestones that the writers work actively toward, I think we can get writers to commit. I'm tempted to run a clearly outlined game to test this theory. I have one in mind, in any case. But that's not entirely relevant.
Dury? I know I swiped your podium... take it back and give us a rousing speech?