FWIW we run into a lot of people that claim they are looking to set up their 'last' system...That seems like a good way of doing things. I think people are still willing - and if anything, actively keen - to see updates to products, in part because they are used to their software going through regular updates. And I also think people are disposed to accept those hardware updates will be chargeable.
I think it's the concept of buying piecemeal and upgrading to better products over the years is starting to run its course. There will still be a lot of people starting with the 'good', trading it in for the 'better' and on to the 'best'. But I think more and more the path is buying upfront, going through the update rather than upgrade process and then eventually moving on. Or maybe up!
Its apparent that the market has been shrinking for some years; IMO as an industry we will become irrelevant unless we are able to inspire a younger generation that there is a real possibility of music. In that regard I am very much of the opinion that the objectivist/subjectivist debate rages on simply because we measure the wrong things, and fail to measure the right things.
As an example, we have seen here pretty clearly that cable capacitance and inductance by themselves do not seem to make much in the way of performance differences in cables. But an ambitious cable project in which I was involved (many years ago) indicated that the real test we should be doing is looking for the Characteristic Impedance of the cable on a TDR. That seemed to yield a lot more in the way of correlation to what we seemed to be hearing in the cables under test at the time. A TDR is only supposed to operate in the RF region; yet we found this correlation... It might be an area worthy of more research, should we be able to agree that in some systems some cables do make a difference. The fact that the cable debate in particular rages on says to me that audible differences do indeed exist. That, BTW, was a major reason we introduced the balanced line system to high end audio- to get rid of cable artifacts.