Doreen, whether you or I like it or not, society works on consensus. Many good hearted people try to avoid conflict by re-defining terms such as "success" and "failure" to be so vague as to be meaningless.
But as a society, there is a consensus on these terms. Trying to ignore that people have a general agreement of what "thriving" is just burying ones head in the sand. Customize is not thriving. And while one can argue all day that the term "thriving" is subjective, in the real world, people have to deal with the fact that life works via consensus. A site that gets only a handful of actual skins uploaded per week (rest are all screenshots and wallpapers) when the other sites (like Deskmod which is sort of a Customize + improvements in its basic design philosophy) are doing far better in every category demonstrates this.
Life is graded on a curve, darwn. You can't just shrug off what people are saying as "these are your rules". It's like back in the 70's when people were trying to rebel against "the man". Well, in real life, "the man" is society and it determines what is and isn't acceptable. Those that don't accept that are doomed for failure. And while some may try to redefine "failure" to be meaninglessly vague, most rational people know failure when they see it.
There is no way to spin the fact that customize.org has fallen and that it's fall is reasonably simple to figure out - the admins have driven away the contributing members of the community by their behavior.
Custo's motto can be summed up by what a user said there (without irony): "If you submit sh*t, you should expect to take sh*t." That seems to be the attitude of the admins. I agree that they have the right to do whatever they want. No one is arguing against that. But they seem to want to avoid the consequences of their actions. The lack of activity there is a consequence of their actions. Actions they freely took.
Ultimately, any successful site is the result of the hard work of lots of different people. No site is an island.
The more contributing people who drive away, the worse off your site is. And on a skin site that is paid for by banner ads, driving away the people who bring the people is bad business. While they attemped to generalize all of Stardock based on their personal dislike for me and tried to argue that it was "damaging our business" (which it certainly isn't statistically) I think a healthy case could be made that their actions have damaged their business financially in a very real way in the form of lost traffic due to lack of activity.
I suppose I could just post the skin submission, download, and message boards stats of every site for the past month (we do monitor this stuff) but I think anyone who's remotely familiar with the various skin sites knows that it's not necessary, custo has slipped further and further behind the other sites. They're free to act as they want, but the results speak for themselves. I personally find it sad that the site got hijacked by a bunch of self-destructive who apparently are out of touch with societal norms. If they behave in real life as they do on their site, I predict they'll have a fairly grim future.
