I've been a Freeshard UO'er since the Cir days of UOX. I've worked with UOX3, RunUO, bit'o'POL, etc.
Every few months I hear that UO/Free UO is dying etc etc etc. Every few months I see shards get 100-200 player boosts. It ebs, it flows. Life goes on.
The problem I see now, though, isn't a client thing. Yes, for awhile, people were getting tired of the same old 2D client, and hoped for an Iris-esque client to compete with the EQs of the world, while retaining the shear DEPTH that UO has to offer.
Time went on, we got the terrible 3D client from OSI, we got KUOC/PlayUO, which was more 2D, and we got Iris. Real 3D. A way to view the UO world the way it was MEANT to be seen (especially Ilsh and AOS).
KR is not a bad client, per se, it just suffers fataly, in my eyes, from the same thing that all the UO clients (including Iris) suffer from, due to what UO is at it's core: It's a tile based game.
Tile based games are easy to manage and code, a breeze to decorate and work in, and fundamentally flawed in terms of true immersion.
Iris is fast becoming a wonderful UO client, and has already surpased most of the 3D OSI client in terms of base features, but the biggest problem is that this wonderful, feature-ful, Orge3D based client is limited to... Tiles.
The biggest issue with a tile based world is that everything is limited to x tiles per action. Everything is required to be "turn based" in a tile environment, even if it's a "real time turn base".
This heavilly detracts from the feeling and flow of a "real world". It also looks damn peculiar in 3rd/1st person when walking
If/when someone takes the opensource RunUO code and Iris code and changes it to be less tile-centric, then there would be a very good, fast, viable MMORPG Server/Client set up that could theoretically do more than EQ, WoW, and UO.
Best of all, with the ample use of custom/non-OSI MULs, Graphics, Sounds, and Maps, it would be 100% free and 100% legal.
Until that happens, though, I think UO is finally on the slow decline that people have been predicted since Fall 1999.