[gguruusa]

I'm not trying to belittle you...it's just that you're looking at a very small picture and equating it to the whole.

Here's the deal:

If you want to count posts/reads, the kitchen wins by a landslide. Not only has the kitchen been out a far shorter time (Robs ROM has been out about twice as long as the kitchen), but the kitchen has more posts/reads - and that's not even including the fact that we start most of the threads over again when we do major releases or that just about every thread here relates to the kitchen.

But here's the real reason the kitchen is so popular: the kitchen targets every user of every carrier in every country. Customized Roms target specific carriers, which severely limits their distribution, and only a select group of users of those carriers at that.

Early kitchens were difficult to use, and that encouraged hard core people to produce ROMs to help out the timid. The current kitchen is much more friendly than before, and that has converted a lot of ROM users to kitchen users. This trend does not show any sign of diminishing presently. The friendliness of the current kitchen is why you only see 1 or 2 custom WM6 ROMs for the apache instead of the 10-15 we had for the WM5 kitchen.

It's also a little taxing on ROM makers to keep a ROM current. Unlike the kitchen, which has bunches of people supporting it, a ROM usually has only 1. You lose a little interest of the one and the ROM dies. Not to mention most everyone here has an itch to be as current as possible, and that creates a natural attraction towards the kitchen - it will always be more current than a ROM based on it.

Throw in that the kitchen keeps getting better. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to draw the inevitable conclusion.

BTW, I'm not saying that there won't be some demand for premade ROMs in the future. What I'm saying is that the mechanism of releasing a ROM will likely be via the kitchen in the future and not via a standalone download. Whether you realize it or not, it's far more practical for everyone involved.