Christian_Baledoubt a revival will ever happen. Sad to say but what they're doing now is what works best for more mainstream wider audiences. I doubt they're interested in appealing to more niche audiences.
Probably correct, at the end of the day it's a business. And the mainstay aspirational part of snowsports is powder trips. Hell, lots of UK ski shops almost exclusively sell the pow kit and touring kit these days when they used to sell everything. The entire focus of the industry is on that as a marketing exercise. I guess powder is and always has been the aspirational part of skiing/boarding because of a few factors:
1. Really good days are generally rather rare in a given season, and has that lightness and float to it, plus the silence as you move.
2. It seems less likely to end in a trip to hospital for the average punter when they try it, than high level park stuff (which of course it is mostly). Even though you can easy do a Michael Schumacher if you haven't seen the conditions before the snow arrives, hence all those sideslipped or snow-plough turned grinds over rocks that you can always see from the chair following 10cm of fresh on a given day....
3. Appears to take less skill and balls than doing a tasty rail or XL line kicker, again true.
4. Can give pro looking photos to people that are actually rather incompetent at skiing or boarding. Hence the term "Pro-snow" which I heard for the first time on a 3 day heli-ski trip in BC in 2008 with some of the aforementioned unskilled people trying heli-skiing instead of learning to ski properly first.
I was quite amazed how many people paid the kind of money out to go heli-skiing when they basically couldn't ski yet, never mind ski proper powder. And it didn't stop them calling themselves "advanced" and even some that thought they were "experts" when asked to assess their own level by the guides. Humility didn't even reach these people's minds being as they were in proper back-country territory for the first time in their lives, because I guess they think it looks easy on film.... I would bet they wouldn't just go try a long nasty rail, or blast off a huge kicker telling all and sundry they are expert at it... And this is one reason park / street stuff will always be somewhat niche, because there is consequence to it and need to have decent basic skill and balance. Everyone learning it to a decent standard will incur injuries and falls along the way, some of which will hurt and may have lasting damage. This is not appealing to the masses. They just want a good looking insta photo from their week a season.
P.S. can you tell its a crap day here in France :-)