[ronie]

one reason for changing the skinning engine is it's often needed in order to add new features to kodi.
also we've made several changes lately to simplify things in order to make it easier (less work) for skinners to create a skin.
third and final reason is, those changes are requested by our current skinners themselves.

it's not like we're trying to bully skinners to make it as difficult as possible for them.
most of the time it's even the other way around, it's us skinners telling the kodi devs
they can't do things a certain way as that would cause too much skin breakage.

as for the number of skins, we're a couple of months away from final Jarvis release
and we already have 9 jarvis compatible skins. that's quite a record you know.

if you check the stats, there's certainly not a decline in the number of skins for kodi.
here's an overview of the available repo skins for past versions of kodi:
dharma - 19 skins
eden - 16 skins
frodo - 21 skins
gotham - 26 skins
isengard - 32 skins