As to the OP; I think it has slowed down a little, the cliquishness has faded away, and people have kind of settled in. I would agree about the rehashed subject matter, but I’d like to add that it seems to me that it’s inevitable on an MB that remembers all, but has a transitory membership. New posters are going to think it’s new, as has already been said.
Lastly, there are two other things that I think bear mentioning:
1.) There seems to me to be a decline in the… you know what? I don’t know how to phrase that without sounding like a snob. Lord knows if we only talked about what I want, it’d all be boring discussions about readily-accessible anime, manga, the “mainstream” videogames, City of Heroes, anything Warcraft, and fanfiction. 
Even so, I feel like the focus on the SDMB used to be about rigourous debate of issues, intimate (personal, not romantic), friendly chat, and research into answering fun questions. Now it’s dull MMP’s, talk about the latest episodes of mainstream television, and rehashing the same highly-charged, polarizing political debates. GQ seems to involve links to wikipedia, snopes, or other on-line resources as often (if not more so) than it does the kind of fun and interesting answers from knowledgeable people in the field that it used to.
2.) One voice among thousands. Which gets more responses, the latest post by a veteran (or highly active) member about their dog being sick, or some poster with <500 posts talking about trying to decide what direction in their life to take? How about CS: Discussion of a specific tv series, book, etc, or another generic thread where everybody lists their favorite/moveing/dramatic whatever without reading the other posters’ responses?
I know that most of my threads only go to 15 or 20 posts at best. I once linked to a short story (about 15 pages when copied into Word) that I really liked, and not one person even posted to say “I don’t read fanfiction.” Granted, the lack of response to my threads could be because I’m a nerd and have no life, but it often feels like people are in too much of a hurry to throw in with groupthink threads that appeal to the SDMB’s demographic, political threads and/or RO threads where everyone asserts their view and gives no quarter to the opposing side, and/or generic “what’s your drive-by?” threads to actually sit-down and discuss things of interest.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I feel like in the old days, before I felt like I was mature enough and sufficiently well-informed to really get involved (basically the last few years or so), people seemed to really make an effort to get to know eachother, and get involved in discussion. Nowadays its sometimes feels like no one has the energy, and the forum has become a wall of noise where people blast out their thing, and that’s it. Just like every other forum, except with better moderation, better writing, and less junk (ascii-image responses, one-word responses, images, giant sig-lines, images in sig-lines, animated images in sig-lines, etc).
I still like the SDMB a lot, and I certainly am not going anywhere, but I readily agree that it doesn’t seem to be as interesting a place as it used to be. I think it has more to do with the age of the board, than anything else though (including pay-to-post).
[QUOTE=CarnalK]
Hey, ‘five years ago’ is the new ‘10 years ago’, grandpa.
It’s hard to say when they refuse to implement any level of the “who’s online” feature.
[/QUOTE]
I agree with the first statement, only I’d characterize it more strongly. In an internet community, 5 years is an eternity.
As to the latter statement, is that a woosh? Haven’t you noticed the dots next to posters names, and how they are sometimes green, and sometimes grey? It tells you if the poster is logged in. Are you talking about something else? I know there’s a lot of MB features that they don’t include for one reason or another (generally perfectly reasonable ones at that), but if I’m reading your post right, this ain’t one of them.
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