[stcredzero]

"Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?"

Growth is a big part of the problem. It's much the same for movies. You can either appeal to a more discriminating audience, which is inherently smaller, or go lowest common denominator. Actually, the pattern is to start out appealing to the discriminating crowd to get a "cool" cachet, then expand and go mass-market.

Another big problem is the monkey-see-monkey-do nature of Homo Sapiens. Over time, you will see more noise in the form of attempts at imitating signal instead of true signal.