Answered, although on Question 6 I had to tweak the scores so the form would accept them at all.
As for the discussion topic at hand, I'm going to say yes. The UK went through a bit of a coaster boom around the 1990's, with so many parks building quite big coasters. Places like Southport Pleasureland, Fantasy Island, Oakwood, Lightwater Valley or Drayton Manor found money to build coasters with multiple inversions and/or custom-designed layouts. Alton went and shelled out for many designs that were actually world leading. BPB had the biggest coaster in the world. Thorpe built the fastest coaster in Europe. There was built a lot of rides on a scale that's totally unseen today. No wonder why CoasterForce sprung up in Britain at the time it did, it seemed like every Brit had a home park that got big, new coasters on the scale the rest of Europe could only dream of.
And now... the Brits can only dream too. It was mentioned in the Paultons Park thread that since 2009, only seven coasters have been built in the UK with a top speed higher than 65 km/h. Alton Towers and Thorpe Park seem to be the only ones that build custom designs these days, with BPB pulling a surprise Icon after a drought since 1994. A new multi-inversion coaster on the scale of, say, Soopa Loopa that Lightwater Valley got in 1981, would be completely unheard of for anyone but the big three today. Something like The Big One at Blackpool or Odyssey at Fantasy Island just wouldn't be built at all, period. No actor is big enough to afford that these days. What coasters the smaller UK parks get nowadays are mostly second-hand stuff from Pinfari, Zamperla or Reverchon, like Big Apples or Spinning Wild Mouses (sidenote: I think a discussion we had a few years back concluded that the plural of Wild Mouse is Wild Mouses and not Wild Mice).
And this brings us around to the sad fact that coasters have a limited operating lifespan like any other piece of machinery. Many of the big coasters of the 1980s and 1990s are no more. For some reason or other, the parks can't afford to operate them any more, and they are torn down and moved out of the country (surprisingly few coasters are actually scrapped in the UK. Most seem to be relocated - if RCDB is to be believed, Corkscrew at Alton is the biggest coaster to have been scrapped in the UK since WWII). Coasters like Nemesis, The Big One and Shockwave are turning 25 this year. The Ultimate at BPB and Vampire at Chessington are pushing 30. Woodies like Antelope and Megafobia are well above 20. And there doesn't seem to be money to replace many of them. Alton Towers and Thorpe will probably manage to maintain their classics or find something good to replace them with, but I doubt Lightwater Valley will have another like it ready when Ultimate kicks the bucket. When M&D's' Tornado or Fantasy Island's Millennium leave their parks, will there be money to get something else on the same scale? When the last Schwarzkopfs or looping Pinfaris are turned down in their final safety inspections, will there be will to invest in something else with inversions? Or will the fall-back option be yet more Reverchon Spinners and various Big Apple coasters?
And what will be the consequences when Merlin realizes its competition has lowered the bar? Who wants to build a B&M when you can still have the biggest show in town with a Maurer Sohne? Heck, the decline of the small parks in the UK kind of show that building big rides, beloved though they may be, will not make a park the next Disneyland. Drayton Manor just retired G-Force after 15 seasons of operation, but the big thrill coaster seems to have done less to attract guests than the Thomas Land expansion. Maybe the industry now can look back at the glorious nineties and conclude: "Yeah, that didn't work all that well. Seems like we can't rely on big coasters after all."
From a coaster enthusiast point of view, I think the situation looks quite grim. But on the other hand, at least travel is getting so cheap and convenient that it's quite easy to get to big coasters anyway.
