You realize there's a 10 year gap between 1992 and Paizo publishing the magazines right?
This is the second time you've done this. First you tried to blame the Mentzer red box (which ceased publication in 1991) for the late-'90s decline of TSR. Now you're trying to pretend that a collapse you originally cited to 1982 is being supported by numbers you're pulling from 2002+ because there "had to be some tailing off somewhere along the lines".
Quickly skimming through the thread again, I can see no one claiming that D&D has never suffered a loss of players. So it seems like you're whacking away at a strawman there.
I'm also unclear on what your point is supposed to be at this point. You started out by arguing that the Mentzer red box was a failure because it failed to retain players, but you really don't seem to have explanation for how that's supposed to connect with supposed market drop-off a decade after the Mentzer red box was out of print.
AFAICT, from the limited information we have:
(1) D&D experienced explosive growth from roughly 1978-1983.
(2) The growth reached a plateau in 1982-1983, but was not followed by a dramatic collapse of the D&D market. In fact, the total size of the market seems to have been largely unchanged between 1983 and 1992.
(3) During the 1990s, the size of the D&D market declined. It's unclear how large this decline was.
(4) With the release of 3E, the size of the D&D market increased. It's unclear how large this increase was.
Couple of final notes:
The post-'83 plateauing of the market probably meant that fewer core rulebooks were being sold. If TSR was projecting (as so many young businesses do) that the explosive success of the past 3-4 years was going to continue, they likely were beginning to run into cash flow problems, which would match the reports of UA being rushed out the door. (But given the reputed success of the Mentzer Basic Set as the most successful rulebook of D&D ever published -- a claim which has few numbers attached to it, but has been supported directly or indirectly by a number of TSR and WotC employees -- sales can't have completely bottomed out, either, even taking the product's 8 year longevity into account.)
While I think the steady subscription rate of Dragon Magazine from '83 to '92 pretty much negates any claim that the D&D market collapsed during that time period, I don't think you can extend that logic to conclude that a collapse of Dragon's subscription numbers post-1992 necessarily indicate that the D&D market as a whole was collapsing.
First, during the '80s Dragon Magazine was the primary source of official source material for the game. As AD&D2 ramped up the supplement treadmill in the '90s, this ceased to be true. And it became even less true post-2000 with the D20 boom. Thus a major selling point of the magazine has become significantly diluted over the past 20 years.
Second, the effect of the internet on magazine subscriptions in general has been catastrophic. Trying to separate out the effect of D&D's market shrinking from the effect of the magazine market in general collapsing is going to be difficult or impossible.
Basically, in comparing subscription numbers in 1983 to subscription numbers in 1992 you're basically comparing apples-to-apples. In comparing subscription numbers in 1992 to 2002 or 2008, you're comparing apples-to-oranges.
