I usually see the statement of DZ being death by you and many others, but yes sorry if I made it seem like you were stating that right now. What I meant is inactivity in a way like you just said, since people usually tend to exaggerate about this topic.
In the other hand the reason why I think we are seeing less activity, there can be multiple reasons. Less interest in the game over all, lack of prominent content, Kage leadership, no more village planned events with gm, internal problems in each community making people quit the game for some time and many other reasons that adds up to what we see today. Your example of the bounty pages seems interesting, but by what I have checked I don't really see much difference or in fact I have the feeling is even less. This is something may interest you, we kages have access to how many people are online in the game at every time, I guarantee you that there has been an activity decline over all not only at DZ.
Totally agree with this, is the same problem as bi warrior. However, I would argue that map camp is not viable at all if what you want is win a fight and get kills since people would not push, it mostly works instead as a defensive strategy to set your enemy away.
Postscript: You may wanna add for alternative entrance at sand and mist too, would make things even better and add a lot of gameplay value to village raids, even more in sand case which has a 5 wide tiles entrance.