I'm sure the economy has something to do with it. Let's face it, very few industries are not affected by it. Add to that the fact that they do pay not only for the articles, but pay by the word and there's a fairly easy incentive to cut down on the articles particularly if their profits are down. While I think that many aspects of 4th Ed. have been a pretty big success, I do think that the DDI subscription with its included access to all of the rules and crunch have almost certainly cut into the book sales, which naturally cut into the overall profits. On top of that, they have essentially had to pay to have the VTT built twice, and its still not in full release.
The trick now is to figure out how to maximize the profit potential of DDi. Getting the CB back up to speed (i.e. to where the old CB was at) and getting a functional set of Adventure Tools will, in my opinion, likely give them the biggest bang for the buck in the short term. I'm not certain though that adding articles, or even keeping up with the old amount, will result in more sales. At that point they have to evaluate how many sales they'll lose through reduced article counts.
In sum, I don't necessarily think the sky is falling; however, I do agree that things are not going as well as we would like at WotC (and I'm not just talking about management, but sales as well).
