Great thread, but I have an idea why Sleazy uses the past form when speaking about ARS.
It's been simply an impression from many people that ARS lost significant market share and made some bad business decisions... you made the right decisions as you say but people can't know it.
And you changed constantly lots of things, changed payouts, some sites had paid trials, then free trials, then paid trials again, Champs was created as BYOT replacement, then moved to PimpRoll, not to mention all the addition of maisntream programs, that didnt really took off ( ? )
I mean ARS was adult revenue service, then advertising revenue service, then arsri.com etc . Now it's adultrevenueservice.com again, heh
some webmasters like stability but I am glad to see that ARS is growing again