I feel as though the turning point with grime came fairly early on, around the spring/summer of 2004 - although my chronology might be a bit off, as I followed it from north america via DC++. A few things seemed to happen around that time that made grime a lot less exciting.
Deja stopped doing grime. As great as Rinse is, Deja vu will always be the premier pirate station for grime in my mind. Stumbling accross the Conflict DVD is what made me really get into grime, and I think its still the best DVD of any that have been released, and that the recorded sets from Deja are the best sets around.
Eskimo Dance going on hiatus. Although this didnt really effect me, it seemed to be a pretty big blow to the live events side of things. Also, later on, the Sidewinder events being consistently bad a few times in a row (cameo's birthday bash for one) had a lot of people complaining last year.
N.A.S.T.Y. dissolving. No one has replaced them as the undisputed top crew, and their new incarnation is obviously inferior. In general, the crews these days just don't really compare to the old crews like nasty, boyz in the hood, east connection, or meridian in terms of having a cohesive, unique sound and vibe when they are on the radio or on stage.
Half-time tracks. "what" was cool as a contrast to a lot of the faster stuff like "golly gosh" and "stomp" that was being played, but once half-time or that plodding sort of sound became the norm rather than the exception, everything got really boring, in my opinion.
finally, to respond to one of Logan's points: "Find us a promoter or a shop owner willing and we will go there. That's why people go abroad. There are people willing to reach out and contact us and get us out there. And more often than not we end up going for a very small amount of money because it is all for exposure."
This was not the case in North America. In the spring of 2005 there was a lot of momentum for grime here, a very generous offer from an organization that wanted to fund monthly tours throughout North Amerca, and a number of promoters that were dying to make it happen throughout the eastern states and canada. Yet the terms demanded by the agency that represents most of the top grime artists were SO unreasonable, and their expectations SO overblown that it was completely impossible to work anything out. Also around the same time matt shadetek (sizzle) moved to europe. He held it down in NY and did things properly, so when he left, a very necessary linchpin in NYC was missing. That void was filled by corporate organizations like the Knitting Factory that were not suitable promoters of underground music, but had money to throw around (and straight up lose) in order to book what was then a fashionable music trend that would help the image of their venue and get the venue's name in a glut of newspaper articles.
Strangely, this same Knitting Factory situation is set to happen here in Toronto, with a new $3 million dollar mega-club called Circa being opened by Peter Gatien next month. Apparently they have booked Skream for June 30th, and Wiley, JME and Maximum sometime in July. I'm really looking forward to these shows, although I don't know what to expect. Junior Vasquez is doing the grand opening, and parts of the venue are decorated with floor to ceiling Bruce LaBruce photos. I'm curious to see how they will fit grime into that type of environment.
anyways, sorry for the rambling post, I've been a longtime lurker here and firsttime poster, so I guess I have a lot of pent-up commentary on grime.