Are things slower around here?

[Rhyme]

Anything I'm missing/wrong about?

The excessive emphasis on sprites.

you say this but you just compared tsr to a sprite-based website that hosts almost exclusively sprite recolors (which are REALLY easy to get into) :

Honestly, the primary differences in terms of projects is standards.

MFGG has low standards, and they get shit done.
TSR has impossible standards and bicker the Smash project into the ground about the placement of a single pixel.

having a standard isn't why people don't sprite or finish projects

this being a spriting-based website (which it kind of isn't exclusively a spriting website anymore) is potentially why spriting is most of what gets done here, because most of the people who are still around are oldfriends, but the entry level of other activities (modeling, music, sfx, whatever) also contributes to that. finding tutorials for getting into any of those is pretty hard if you're a beginner; while spriting has a Lot Of Guides and spells things out for you, excluding things such as anatomy or etc