I think what a lot of people don't understand as well is the fact that Spiral Knights was always a game that found its strength in grouping everyone up together instead of separating them. As the game has evolved, it has slowly moved more and more into separating players from each other, which means you'll find more competent parties for what you're playing, but you won't have that early-day fun of running into a tier 2 run with 1 vet, 2 mid tier players, and one new player who has NO idea how they're alive.

The introduction of missions, difficulty levels, and the party finder has contributed to this separation. Early in the game they played with this idea with subtowns, but scrapped it to make Haven the only hub. Unfortunately, the issues with this method showed up anyways in the actual gameplay, which caused its own form of hurt.

However, that's only for gameplay issues. The point outlined in the OP is why people aren't finding the game anymore. Spiral Knights was released during a critical time, and that timing is a huge impact on the success that it did have. With very little advertising, this game was a perfect nameless game. You could play it in your browser, on Steam, and from a standalone client, all with the same people! This was also during a time when Macs were slowly being pulled into the world of gaming, and also the time when "free to play" was just beginning to become a hot new type of game. Very few games could be played through Steam on Mac, and even fewer of them were free to play.

Something to keep in mind though is that Spiral Knights also has a very niche audience. The game isn't for everyone, and skills you have from other games will not often transfer over to Spiral Knights, meaning it is an entirely new learning experience for most players. This isn't a bad thing, but if you play FPS games you can jump into another FPS game with minimal problems most of the time. To top this off, Spiral Knights combat is fast, but with slow movements, meaning situational awareness is much more important in Spiral Knights than quick reflexes.

All-in-all, folks love to say Spiral Knights has so much potential. Yes, in a perfect world it definitely does. However, it did get much more success than people give it credit for. The fact it's still around 7 years later without a fan revival is an amazing feat. It's never going to be a TF2, it's never going to be a Fortnite or Minecraft, and believing it will is a bit too unrealistic for me. But, for the genre it is in, it does so many things right, and it did so many things right on its timing and promotion.

I'm looking forward to see where it's taken from here, and am still hoping for the day where the devs come back into the limelight because I think they're pretty cool and want to shower them with my appreciation.

Man, I'd really like to see how it's gonna work without keyboards. I think I need to exercise my fingers a lot to be able to single switch flourishes on a touch-screen xD