While the structure of the generation itself will have had something to do with it (it's more interesting to debate and predict how things might be when there is less to go on) The graphing features being taken out made it much too difficult to talk about sales when numbers have to be updated so much. I don't have a problem with updating the sales figures often as it should make them more accurate, but without site tools to quickly check things making a properly detailed sales thread involves tedious Excel work copying weekly data just to make simple comparisons.
The sales threads started dying when the graphs were taken out (if I remember correctly, at the time we were promised new improved graphs within a few weeks, it was months later we got some graphs on game pages that had some nice new features, but still lacked the usefulness of the old ones)
The forum started dying with VGC 3.0 (or whatever version introduced this gamrconnect stuff)... I will admit that functionality has improved again for the current set-up (lets call it VGC 3.5) but the chartz side of things is still almost at it's worst since 2006 (the only improvements over the worst being the addition of UK/FR/GE game charts and the game database that has sales info) and the forum is still missing some key features.
EDIT: ok most of what I have said has already been said.
