As you note, there are something like 700,000 licensed people in the US, but if you tune in to your local repeater and listen for a month, you will hear the same 2-8 people, typically in their 70s - and that's about it. They're there due to force of habit, and when they die, they're not going to be replaced. The same demographics can be observed for most ham clubs, maybe outside the SF Bay Area (where the median age is closer to 50).
So what are we really protecting here - a "community" representing and speaking on behalf of maybe 0.1% of all licensed individuals? Is this something to treasure, or should we bite the bullet and instead encourage a larger group of people to build something new?
And I hate to say this, but I think this situation is of their own doing. The old-timers wanted all the newcomers to follow in their footsteps and get excited in exactly the same things. As evidenced in the community-developed ham exam, which deals with such exciting and timely topics as tuning vacuum tube amplifiers, receiving analog slow-scan TV signals, memorizing Morse code shorthands, and DX contests that lost most of their "oomph" when the Internet showed up.
Meanwhile, VFH / UHF handheld-to-handheld messaging is still an elusive technology, and many old-timers don't consider anything above HF to be "real ham".