I was writing a book in response, but everything I had to say could be condensed to this:
The fandom is different, but growing. If you loved the first and second season, you still like Season 5. You won't love it, but you'll like it. S5 finale is amazing, btw. Season 4 is solid. Artists (visual and music) are probably leaving because there's so much competition within the fandom concerning the arts, ie., there are so many amazing new artists that some of the old guard are leaving. To me, there's more of a focus on fan-work than actual episodes these days, which is far different from when we joined up in 2011. You might think that's bad, but again, some of these content creators are amazing. Some are better than Hasbro IMHO. (Some, but very few.) Hasbro does seem like they're struggling a bit and making some bad moves, but they still have Daniel Ingram for music which speaks volumes.
As a guy who left the fandom for about a year, now is a good time to come back.