The community has grown in the past year. Some of you are clouded by your own leaders failures to see that. IR alone has introduced a couple 100 if not half a thousand people to the community in the past year. As I've said before, if the former LPC people who've run away to xLPC moved back up there would be even more clans and better action/exposure for the entire community. We have a great product here that is far better than some brown sticky stuff ironman training slayer, but many of you would rather be failures than pull your clan out of a ditch or promote the community as a whole.
As it relates to defense, the only clans that do not bring mains or kids with 20-39 defense are IR, Apex and FI. The rest of you are in full control of your actions and can decide not to "cheat" whenever you'd like. Most normal members don't enjoy fighting mains on the weekend. Simple as that.
I would say the past few weekends there has been one very bright shining point and that is the rise of anti-crashing. I've seen EOP, FI, APEX and IR all engage in anti-crashing for various fights which has dramatically increased the amount of clean action. Additionally some clans have proven able to use their brains enough to actually coordinate a team on crash with has further limited the amount of crashing and thus pro-longed cleaner action.