What happened with Gamers Advanced is comparable to a squirrel trying to be a squid; with the squirrel ultimately failing because it is better at being itself and just because it could observe the squid's niche does not mean it could emulate it. At least from my observations, what brings people here besides others that are already here is illustrated in this progressive categorical line - Nintendo -> Zelda -> Fan Games -> Programming.
Well said, except the awesome part about squids is when they change colors..
With that said, depending on how ZFGC reforms itself over the next few months will be how we'll manage the boards over the next few months. I consider our main focus to be game development, rather than zelda itself, zelda is just the influential part of what we do here.
GA itself was a wonderful idea and had a very good chance at being successful from the administration view point, however here is what we did wrong. We took a community that was focused around Zelda Game Development and pushed it into a general game website, there's very little logic in it and our goal and intentions of it was taking a gob of users with us, so we'd have some form of base under it. The reason for merging with DSR was to find a bunch of users that would at least appeal to the Zelda aspect, via the Nintendo link, it was really our only route, other than bring ZFGC back, which eventually happened after ZFGC-X and all of that crap. It's very easy to get burnt out on managing a website, specifically if it's not going the way you want it to.