Thought provoking, as always.
I feel like there is a disconnect to a certain extent between those people with the mindset that paintball, and speedball particularly, is a sport.
Not to get all hifalutin on you, but I think of the health of the paintball industry as a series of growth and retention steps that look something like this:
1: introduction to paintball
2: conversion to a regular player
3: conversion to speedball player
4: conversion to tournament player
5: reasons for quitting: burnout, financial, etc
So, I often feel like a lot of people are still curious about paintball and will try it with essentially the same frequency as ever. Groupon might even help.
However I truly believe that since 2006, the preponderance of ramping guns and decline in quality of paint has led to the initial playing experience becoming, for lack of a better term, less addictive. We need to hook in those grouponers and say, hey, this is what paintball really is, this is why it's fun, this is why we choose to play. In other words, our rate constant from step 1 to step 2 is bad.
Making matters worse is that our step 2 to step 3 conversion is bad. I generally like a well executed woodsbsll game, but lord, that format is hard to nail, it reeally is. It's do easy for a field layout to just create horrible stagnation as soon as more than a few players are on at a time. I appreciate that guys like to do milsim stuff, and often those are the guys with money to back it up, but from the perspective of a sport? Speedball is a great mix of teamwork, athleticism, and cunning.
I think that a combination of lessons, improved paint, lower rof, and better stewardship of new speedball players would have a significant impact on getting players to steps 3 and 4 (granted this is a simple and imperfect model.)
One thing I really like about lessons is that if provides a source if revenue for local establishments that can't be undercut by the Internet. Hopefully that would suppress the impetus to try to sell lots of paint, which I think probably goes hand in hand with the ramping thing.