I've been around here somewhat frequently in the last few months because I finally grabbed Mupen64Plus and a GoodN64 set. As it turns out, the DualShock 2 I've recently hooked up to my PC does very good double duty as a Nintendo 64 control pad.
Also, tomorrow I will have registered here exactly seven years ago. Which is actually somewhat depressing as Mupen64Plus doesn't actually seem that much more accurate or compatible than the emulators I was using back when I registered here. There's a
very considerable list of games that have serious issues or don't work at all, the intro in Banjo-Kazooie seems even more out of sync now, and I can't find out if framebuffer effects work faster on my new hardware because I don't see any way of enabling them!
I don't want to be too much of a downer, but this is part of the reason I haven't been as active as I used to. About two years ago, I finally got tired of poor emulation. I found I was sick of fiddling endlessly with various settings and still getting graphical glitches and timing issues. I left N64 emulation, promising to come back when that era was over, and it's still here now!
I think this mentality has grown, and more people are put off by 'fiddly' emulation, especially considering the initial rationale was speed, which is less relevant these days with the vast increases we've seen in processing power. Until we see a 'simple' N64 emulator (along the lines of pSX), I think we're not going to see many people around here.