I'm starting to think you're a contrarian. I may have exaggerated the timeframe as it seemed longer ago than 2010 but my point still stands.
After the MLG scandal, competitive Smash couldn't show its face anywhere and the scene died at a national level. It survived on a grassroots level because of the games inherent popularity and thus when EVO offered the chance for redemption it was a "if you build it they will come" moment. But for all intents and purposes, competitive smash was dead in all but a handful of cities with low turnout, low payout tournaments. Very few streams of their events and certainly little to no sponsorships. It's not applicable to MKX because MK just doesn't have that grassroots appeal. In any given area you can probably drive an hour at most and find a sizeable smash playgroup. Same can definitely not be said for MKX. Can't really fault the community for that as it doesn't have nearly the same casual draw as Smash by design.
EDIT: For further proof of how dead the Smash scene was read about it
here. One of the most notable tournaments in 2011 had 100 entrants. Don't know how you can call that anything but dead.
Maybe I'm just looking from a different perspective. This is my 'home' FG scene, and when I found it with MK9 at the end of 2011, we were lucky to get 100 entrants at majors. It'd happen a few times, like NEC, EVO, and a couple MLG's (not all of them), but in general we weren't often breaking 100 players at majors.
But we were most definitely NOT dead. We had a core of passionate people that loved the game and were eager to compete -- and if we only had 68 people at a major, it was going to be an exciting and memorable 68 man tourney that'd be talked about for weeks.
If the rest of the FGC didn't care about MK9, we did, numbers or no.
So when somebody tells me that a community which managed to bring 100 people to their own, separate tournament (apart from any other organization or the FGC), and that's 'dead' I just don't see it. Maybe it was a lower point for them, but clearly they were passionate enough to keep the fire burning on their own -- and it paid off.
They were also passionate enough to produce The Smash Brothers documentary around that same time, which came out in 2013 and is by far the most in-depth grassroots gaming doc I've seen to date. And it stoked the flames.
I guess it all depends on what you're used to, but the Smash community has always kept the torch burning in one way or another, however many people they had, and it's paid off for them in spades.