[Darth-Apple]

They apparently want to get out 1.9 within a few months, hears hoping. Proper responsive templates are heavily needed because even if theme designers make them - they easily break with plugins.

It's important to get that out, then hopefully they will get support from plugin and theme creators regaining interest in a new version of myBB which might be more widely adopted. I think currently it has died off a little because it is far behind other softwares (even phpBB which is used to be far superior than). I think once it plays catch up a bit, throughout the 1.X series, it will increase in popularity and support again. At least, I hope.

Well said. I believe that in a sense, it's the community that has always made MyBB great. I've used phpBB and sMF both, and phpBB is too difficult to heavily customize (although they have changed this in recent years), and SMF is, well, oh my god, I don't even know where to begin. It used to be okay but now the whole community seems like it's kinda, well, trashed. (MS started on SMF. It took us all of about two months to switch over. ) 

The smaller the community of plugin and theme designers, the less that MyBB really has to offer. Hopefully 1.9 doesn't break too much. 1.8 maintained general compatibility very well for the most part, but then again, 1.8 didn't see a drastic change in the templates that the switch to a responsive design would require.