I co-founded and ran the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup for some time. There was lots of interest right after the whitepaper up through the crowdsale, then a wa

I co-founded and ran the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup for some time. There was lots of interest right after the whitepaper up through the crowdsale, then a waning of interest in the details, and now resurgence of interest. Like the Bitcoin meetups there does seem to be some correlation between price of the asset and number of attendees but that is unavoidable IMHO. As far as marketing, Tual was the community lead for a bit and he left to do the DAO which has broken crowdfunding records so I don't think you can say he's been unsuccessful. As to the ultimate success of the developer ecosystem, I'm not sure but I used to track metrics like github stars quite rigorously and Ethereum was doing better than any other crypto project.