Are things slower around here?

[Vipershark]

I just read the last four posts, and...
I think... we're all... actually agreeing with each other?

It seems like Kosheh sort of missed the point of what we were saying entirely and yet somehow ended up repeating sort of the same thing in different words.

What we need is to either draw in that teenage demographic looking to improve, and/or keep our userbase in their post-teen years to provide good role models and aspirations for the former.

I've made it pretty clear that we need to do the former (we need a fresh (young) userbase in order to revitalize the site, and we need resources to draw them in, teach them the correct methods in a coherent fashion, and give them what they need to improve) and make that our main goal for now, but I don't see why we can't do the latter as well.

Why does the fact that we help to teach and nurture beginning/middling spriters mean that we can't also cater to experienced ones as well?
Why does our demographic have to be locked to either/or instead of just "spriters"?

Anyway, as far as the original content thing goes, none of us are saying that people can't post .... well, stuff like this

As you said, people have to start out somewhere, and this is how people start. That's a given. But we're talking in terms of showcasing user art representative of the site, and obviously that type of thing isn't what you'd really want to put in a showcase.
Edits and (unoriginal) sprite comics and videos certainly have their place and I'm not saying they should be disallowed, but they shouldn't be something that we rep as a site unless it's somehow REALLY good (which, let's be real, 99.99% of them are complete turds)
Instead we should showcase things that we can say "See how good this is? You could be like this one day too"