I went to HOPE a few weeks ago, after having been to such things before, but not for a few years.

I had exactly the same impression - mostly a lifestyle / social / political thing, pretty light on in the way of talks with actual technical detail. Kind of like TED talks - well presented, entertaining, but not really actionable.

In years gone by, I went to some excellent events, with talks on really specific, useful things (kernel internals, gdb use, ELF dynamic loading, ltrace / strace use, that kind of thing). Can't help but wonder if those sorts of conferences still exist, or the whole scene has changed into something less practical and more lifestyle.