Hey, I coincidentally was just about to post this thread. It's nice to see that Smogon is still alive and kicking; many of the online communities that I've been a member of over the years have evaporated (though some of them persist outside of their original forums). In retrospect my tenure within the Smogon community seems very short-lived, as I mostly stopped caring about competitive Pokemon some time around 2006, after JAA and before the release of Diamond and Pearl. However, even though I only spent a few years on Smogon, I spent numerous hours on these forums during several very formative years of my youth.
The fact that I quit playing Pokemon around the time Netbattle died is not a coincidence. I remember there being a weird period in Pokemon history around 2006-2007 when Diamond and Pearl were released, but initially there was no battle simulator for the new games. It was over half a year between the Japanese release of Diamond and Pearl, and the release of Shoddy. Oddly, Diamond and Pearl were also the first generation of Pokemon games to support internet connectivity, so there was this brief period where you could play online Pokemon with a DS, but not on a computer. The size of the community was limited by the fact that even among DS owners, not everyone had a wireless router, being that this was back in 2007. There were lots of other things that made in-game battling tedious during this era: you had to watch the laborious attack animations, making battles sometimes take 30-60 minutes when they could have been resolved in 5-10 minutes on a simulator, and that's even in the best-case scenario (lag was often an issue). And there was also the fact that you actually had to raise all of the mons that you used in battle, making it a pain to experiment with new things, not to mention the ordeal of certain items like TMs being restricted. This period happened to coincide with my acquisition of a real gaming PC for the first time in my life, and I started playing FPS games like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and Battlefield, which ended up consuming a large chunk of my life thereafter, and that was pretty much the end of my interest in competitive Pokemon. The exception were the occasions that I went to VGC events with my IRL high school friends Metabou and Deagle (I didn't actually play the Pokemon games but Metabou would always generously lend my a team when we went to events together).
My participation in VGC dropped off tremendously during my college years due to not being near any events, and I think my most recent VGC event was attending the Worlds grinder during the Unova-only year. Now that I'm done with school, who knows, maybe I'll start again. I did go to a sanctioned VGC event back in January that was held at an anime convention that I was already attending with some friends, but didn't actually get to play due to technical difficulties (apparently even the physical retail version of ORAS refuses to launch if your 3DS's SD card slot is empty, and I had left my SD card back in my camera at the hotel).
