I'm local, but I finally decided that John Rodgers (president of Comic-Con International) had successfully completed turning SDCC from a convention by, for, and about comics and comic fans into the trade show he wanted it to be where he and his cronies could hobnob with the A-listers without standing in line with the rest of us peons, that the attendees were just product being marketed to the media houses for advertising (and paying for the privilege). The lines for anything even vaguely interesting were insane, and the ones for 'trendy' content were even more so (last year, there were people lining up on Sunday for the Friday Twilight panel), and there was hardly any programming that interested me any more -- I could find panels that might be interesting, but I didn't want to wait in line two hours for each one to find out. And while having so many dealers in one spot was convenient, it wasn't worth the admission cost on its own.
And it's not as if my not purchasing a membership hurts the con, anyway; I'd be surprised if it took ten seconds for the membership I didn't buy to get snapped up when they went on sale. I was downtown last night -- riding the trolley in, because parking downtown is insane when there's not a 150,000-person convention there -- to attend Bioware's SWTOR cantina tour event (and wore my AP33 shirt), but that's the limit of what I'll be doing around the con unless there's going to be an impromptu get-together of CoH players.
