mary,
I have to agree with your points.
What you have described is the destruction of camaraderie.

It is partly caused by the whiners who complain about the lack of events and the way they are being staged.
They feel they are entitled to attend events without doing anything to support the sport.
They attend events and then insult the people who worked hard to stage an event
by complaining that it doesn't meet their standards.
This ruins the experience for the people who are trying to have a good time.

Another issue is the boats themselves.
Like you said, when the fleet consists of low tech beach boats with similar performance,
the skippers can relate to each other.
But today, the casual sailors on their inexpensive beach boats get looked down upon and
ridiculed by the hot dogs on their 20-21 foot rocket ships.
Who wants to sit around at the end of the day hearing some schmuck who has more money than skill,
brag about how fast his boat is?

The Hobie-centric edits from commandant ulibari are proving, as we all said they would,
to erode the ranks of Hobie fleets and alienate potential sailors.

So as long as ther are people out there who;
continually complain about how other people run their events, but never get off their lazy dead butt,
claim they design perfect boats and critisize the design of other boats,
take advantage of other peoples events, but are too elitist to invite others to their events,
work to exclude certain members of the sailing community from participating sinply because of the brand of their boat,
the sport will continue to decline!!!

We make the sport.
If it declines, it is our fault.