Good job Productivity, that post brought a nice TGH vibe to the thread!

You've got some good points (most of which are being discussed at TGH and other GW forums), but i think you're exaggerating the problems. For a casual player, PvE still offers tens of hours of content per chapter - equal or superior to any other action RPG. Let's face it, no sensible person really expects to play any RPG, action or not, for hundreds or thousands of hours without it becoming repetitive. Right?

Count your hours. Based on your titles I'd say that you have at the very least several hundred hours of active playtime. I wouldn't be surprised at all if you had a thousand or two. Game's getting a bit repetitive you say?

The community is complaining, yes, but which community isn't? Balance problems exist in pretty much every game, and GW is actually quite well balanced when compared to the competition. I've played at top 20 level for 15 months now, and my guild has played balanced pressure or splits the entire time. I don't play HA anymore, but my rank 9 was achieved almost solely by monking in pressure teams. All consistent top guilds can play a wide variety of builds.

I think most of the PvP community agrees that GW needs more frequent rebalancing with less dramatic adjustments. As far as I know, the devs see this need too. Squashing ritspike in mid-tournament was at least a start, we'll see how it goes.

Another common complaint is the relative lack of meaningful tournament play, something that the automated tournament system was supposed to address. Anet didn't manage to deliver the system as soon as they'd hoped, but it's a pretty sure bet that they'll implement it once the stopgap Celestial Tournament is over. (They need the system to compete with Fury and to test it for GW2.)

The Guild ladder is dominated in the top 100 by the same 200 people that have been there forever, with incursions by people who are running whatever is imbalanced for the last month to farm their way quickly up. They never stay there and most of the more established top players view them with a good deal of contempt.
Breaking into hardcore GW is still very much possible. I'd say the biggest hurdle for a completely new player is actually the expense of buying all the chapters, not ingame reasons. Talented players with social skills and some initiative will eventually manage to build (or get into) a successful social network, just like before. It really differs little from breaking into top-level team-based FPS games.

There's a reason why gimmick players are viewed with contempt and why they inevitably drop from the top. They don't play to learn - they take the short-sighted approach of "playing to win" in the ladder. Ladder (or player) rank means squat; gimmick players inevitably lose in tournaments against more generally skilled teams. Playing to learn = playing to win in the long term.

Your numbers and the prediction about the community collapsing seem to be a bit off. Sure, some vets claim that they are leaving but with thousands of hours in the clock, the main reason is quite likely burnout. _Anything_ gets stale eventually. And, many of them are coming back anyways - there's no real alternative yet. Even a minor rebalance is an excuse to come back when the market doesn't offer anything else.

If you want to look at hard numbers, check out the ladder. Even guilds in the 900-1000 range appear quite active. About 1000 or more gvg games are played each day; wait times in the 100-200 range (where our alliance's pickup guild is) are about a minute or two in Euro primetime. The Celestial Tournament had 211 competing guilds last I checked, despite all the issues with timezones and fallback times. I'd say the game is still alive and kicking.