To answer the OP's statement, the amount of POBs decaying is probably down to a handful of reasons.
1) People not happy with the changes/the direction the mod is heading - these people just up sticks and leave (very few bother with leaving Threads, as we all generally know where that leads to).
2) Mining dying a death. A lot of Bases were used as a hub for Miners to drop Ore and Haulers to pick it up and transport it to wherever. Quite a few were 'non-profit' making Bases ie, the Miner sold to the Base for a price and the Haulers buying for the same price. The Base Owner picking up the tab for the upkeep.
Now Ores aren't worth hauling as the Refined Goods are the 'new' ore.
b) The distance/accessibility of getting some ores just isn't worth the effort.
Lets take Gold Ore as an example.
Planet New London pays 30 credits for a load of ore. For that you have to travel down a Trade Lane, then cruise 30k to the Jump Hole, then cruise another 50k to the Mining Field. Mine your Ore, now reduced to 50% because it takes up 2 Units, and then cruise back to PNL. So a round trip of 160k and 2 TLs for 30 credits x 50% of your hold.
On the way to the Mining Field, you have to cruise past the Molly POB (approx 30k from the field). They possibly have alerts when certain Tags/names enter Dublin., because you can quickly be wearing 3+ Mollys, including a GB.
Canary Wharf Station offers Miners 50% increase in the price of Ore (ie 45 credits per unit) and this still doesn't entice people to mine.
Why should they mine, when they can run their Zoner Whales all day from Arranmore with Gold to Delta and Iridium back? It almost a constant occurrence.
I believe this isn't the only Field with this kind of problem.
c) Refineries - Nice idea but maybe needs tweaking some. Lets say you sell 30k of Refined Goods. That needs replacing. You have a Refinery (all's well then). To replace the 30k (and you get the bonus) you will need 42,500 units of Ore. Using a 5ker, that is 17 trips there and back.
A few Mining Fields have been moved further away from their original positions, so this now adds time. So, unless you have dedicated group of Miners/Haulers, the Mining has died and people will just mine enough for their needs (for those Groups making the 'special' equipment).
3) Cost - Before the update, to maintain a Core 4 Base it would cost about 1.2 million a day, 8.4 million a week, 404 million a year (giving 4 weeks off for Christmas). This was at cheapest prices.
Now it costs 41,440 (4.1 million) a day, 290,080 (29 million) a week, 13,923,840 (nearly 1.4 billion) a year. This is at the cheapest prices.
Old prices:
RA = 250 - price was generally the same everywhere.
Food = 72
Oxygen = 20
Water = 30 maximum this ever went up to was about 120 credits
New Prices:
BA = 7
Food = 5
Oxygen = 1
Water = 1
These are all tradeable commodities now so just moving 1 System from source can easily increase the prices by about 5-7 credits each. This makes that 41,440 credits each day shoot up quite drastically.
There may be other reasons, but these are my observations from talking to people.
'I would like to be half as clever as some people like to believe they are' Life is full of disappointments, it is how we handle them that helps to define us, as a person
