What Happened To Dragonlance?

In my effort to produce more original content and thoughts (instead of overwhelming the blog with link-ups), I had another question I wanted to ask you folks about.

Question: What happened to the Dragonlance series?

By the above question, I mean, what happened to the series in terms of sales and shelf space? Most of my local bookstores devote very little room to the Dragonlance books, though Forgotten Realms novels still seems to get a good deal of room on the shelves. It was a fairly popular series in the 1980s and into the 1990s, but really seems to have fallen on hard times in the 2000s. I am not basing this assumption on sales figures, but on the dwindling shelf space. But I am assuming that the lack of shelf space is due to a corresponding lack of sales.

All of the ideas below are just MY guesses at what the might have caused the (perceived) fall of Dragonlance. Any one agree with these, or have some others I might have missed? Or do you totally disagree that Dragonlance has fallen on hard times?

1) The books are mostly stuck in a 1980s style of fantasy the most readers today aren't interested in. (though personally, this style still works for me, if well-written)

2) Once the series got popular, too many books came out in a short period of time. Readers felt the series was more about making money off many books instead of publishing quality novels.

3) Tied to #2 above, due to the rapid increase in the number of novels, many of the books were badly written, or written by first time authors who quickly disappeared.

4) Its been 25+ years, and like all things, it can be hard to maintain a high quality over that period of time.

5) The novels never really had a "breakout" series outside of the core Weiss & Hickman novels. That's not to say that there werent other good books, but no other authors could repeat the popularity of the original authors.

6) Most readers are sceptical of most shared-world novels.

7) It is hard to pick out the good novels/authors from the bad.

8) New readers might be intimidated by the number of novels, and not know where to begin. Or they might feel like they would have to read too many books to get familiar with the story, and are hesitant to invest the time.

9) The Fifth Age was a bad decision and turned many loyal readers away.

10) Too many of the stories were about the same set of characters (i.e. all the novels talking about a certain event in the life of Tanis, Raistlin, Flint, Tas, etc. See the preludes series and similiar books).

Those are just some of the reasons I have been able to come up with. I happen to like many of the Dragonlance series, though there are also many that are pretty crappy. I keep hoping we will see some sort of uprising or rebirth of the Dragonlance world, as I really like the idea of shared world novels. There is lots of potential for a depth of history and setting that you can't get in a trilogy. But, this potential is easily abused if "bad" authors publish too many noveles in the world. And a lack of oversight to keep the history and world-building consistent can easily doom a shared world setting. But, I think with strong oversight (editing?) and quality authors writing in the world, shard world novels can be really, really tempting. Although you have to remember this opinion is coming from someone who reads primarily secondary world epic fantasy :)