Before I even begin this I just want to state that I love pivot had love to do it as a past time.
Okay back to the topic. Pivot is most likely not rising in popularity due to the separation of the community. I'm not talking about the ranking which is very important when looking for certain types of animations but what I am talking about is the amount of different websites there are out there. Most of the people on TDD are also on other pivot websites as well. Well that is great and all but that will sometimes confuse the average pivitor. I've be on so many different websites from PA to Shuniui West (idk if I spelled that right) to TDD. The all have some of the same aspects with a few minor changes like the color and some added/removed subtopics.
The best example of I united program family is Flash with its StickPage. Now I'm not saying that is the only Flash website out there but it is the most popular one and has the most flashers on it. But the thing is there aren't that many competitors that can compete with how big the StickPage has become.
With Pivot there are so many different websites that a lot of the popular pivotors jump from website to website. This in turns spreads out the community because the new comers are looking for the most recent website the best of the best is on. So some might find TDD or PA but not all of them will find both.
And this is where the problem arises. With so many pivot websites a lot of the new animators are so spread out on each website that each individual website slowly dies off because of inactivity. With a joined pivot community we could make more joints and colabs and then a big single youtube channel to post the best of the best from each rank for each month. This would in turn attract more pivotors to that single channel, then to that single website and then we could become even bigger. None of that will happen if we stay the way we are.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall.