I too respectfully disagree. What caused me to flock to foobar was not it’s aesthetics even though the things that people using Panels or Columns was appealing. What piqued my curiosity about foobar was and still are from the audio side of things: the numerous DSP components, the low resource footprint, and the audio fidelity (which was better than Winamp at the time of my switch). Masstagger, support for FLAC and monkey formats, and the superior media library management capabilities were also a bonus.
Of course, with proper work an open source program can (and perhaps will) become a successor for foobar. But its been my assessment that much of the audio industry is bent on destroying anything that tries to apply open source to audio (example: why won’t my iPod support FLAC natively, yet will run unprotected wma?!?!). And I won’t hold my breath for a breakthrough open source project that can match the modularity, flexibility and fidelity of foobar.
So while maybe foobar is seeing a decline from the aesthetic and the friendliness of its user base, in my heart it will always have a place for what is beneath the eye-candy.