Yeah, the forum's last heyday was pre-Switch, when we only knew of the mysterious NX, and we all had time to debate about what the best path forward for Nintendo would be.
Since then, a lot has happened to splinter our community:
-The forum became 100% its own thing, which took away a connection to the larger site and made this place a bit of an island.
-Discord took the place of the chat (and Community Thread).
-The Switch itself gave us so much to play that we don't have community games anymore. (We all used to play COD or Splatoon. Now we're all playing a bunch of different stuff and don't have games in common to discuss.)
-The gaming "culture" landscape is unrecognizable from what it once was. Fanboy wars fed forums during the Wii/360/PS3 days. We used to spend days arguing about something dumb said on G4. That's all gone. There's a sort of "all these systems are badass"-detente.
-The old guard here got...well, old. Any community needs to have people that stirred the pot. When we moved from IGN, we already brought along a less troll-y crowd, so it's always been quiet. But now even the quiet forumites are older, with less free time.
This place needs an overhaul. We have too many sub-forums. We really only need the CT, the game completion thread, and then whatever odds and ends pop up.