This fits with my theory of online evolution. Its kind of like the death of punk rock: the players got good.
- The simplicity of a tool attracts novices,
- the novices develop cool things,
- the novices get good and start to put greater demands on the tool,
- the tool starts to evolve to accommodate those demands,
- the tool develops a steep learning curve at the beginning,
- a new simple tool is born to replace it and is adopted by novices.

For Examples:
- MS Access/VB Script
- ASP/COM/Access -> ASP.NET
- PHP/SO -> PHP 5.4/compiled/smarty templates