The dumbing of the hobby.
With a PC getting the data, you can do anything with it. We use programs like Brian's to manipulate, graph, record and display analysis.
When we stop rolling our own, we are pretty much stuck with what the people like Davis contract to have programmed, then other than break fixes, shut things down.
I've seen many cool things done with data here, especially with Meteotemplate and the Saratoga initiatives. At one point with simpler tools, I used QBasic and an old PC to give me a rudimentary Weather Display, and learned a hell of a lot about programming, data bases, overloading a proecessor with all my ideas balancing against just making it work.
Heck, it is hard to find someone in high school who can do any programming outside of a web page. When computers filled rooms and Digital Equipment Corp was just putting PDP-8s and 11s on the market, I spent time with buddies going over the language manuals and learning how to program even though we couldn't get to a real computer to try out our ideas.
I lament the loss of various projects that WD allows some in this group (and unseen folks, too) in bringing laser and ultrasonic snow depth detectors, clear sky detectors, Bloomskys, additional soil and water temperatures, UV, sunshine, on and on with things that are either very expensive our outright not available with the Wx stations that are mass produced. Yes, those companies can fork over the bucks to hire engineers to do it right (something that unfortunately Heathkit didn't quite do so well with the ID-5001 in so many ways) but look at the discussion of the more accurate temp and humidity chips and all.
As we drift to an off the shelf hobby, so will folks be happy with the dumbed down offerings that make it so very exciting to be here.