You're wrong about that, michael. Runescape Private server development Will eventually die out, and not for the reasons that you highlight.
Yes, players play it for the old school feel, but they have RS2007 for that now (and boy, is it fun). What is killing RS private server dev is the stingy developers themselves. On top of being a low-skill population of programmers, we have every kid on the block not wanting their code "leeched." This is what started the decline here, and I'm guilt of it as well.
See, most sources still use the same fundamental code, and it's not very good. While we have bad-asses like Graham, Super_ and Luke from RS-Server that shell out high-quality frameworks, that's all they are... Frameworks. They have a good knowledge of the game's functionality, but not of the game itself. They end up perpetually releasing more frameworks instead of doing what matters; getting content working is last on the to-do list.
This, in turn spawns out the "servers suck too easy nothing to do" attitude that drives PS users back to official. If there was a community project, like WoW's MangOS or maple's open source projects. If we had a community actually LEARN the game client and the server framework, we could have many developers add their content to the game (after some discretion of course). If we had something like that, our feature list would be a lot more complete. RS itself is a lot smaller than wow, and a community of a few hundred could easily populate content while a handful of core programmers ensure stability.
This section died beacuse we didn't think like that, so our developers grew tired of just making frameworks. I did. Jangan did, Fedexer moved on, and so on and so forth. It won't be coming back here.