I blame the downfall of Custom Wars on a few factors:
1. Too much not team members wanting to help, namely the shit load of COs everyone wanted to invent, which grinded the work to a slow crawl.
2. Impatience, reworded to, fuck you reddragon13. More importantly, a lack of tabs being kept on the general staff.
3. Judge system, they shot down everything, but some how, as Stuffman said, broken COs seemed to continue to walk right in. And then there's the near useless hovercraft which infantry were more than able to pop a hole in with their guns.
Yeah, I was Andynator (Did I use that name at one point? >_O) over there, but didn't manage to really help the project, so I eventually jumped ship. Still, the project seemed to revive as the last update was May 9th, not even a month ago, so I'm glad that even after all of this, the project is still going. Hope they'll manage it better this time.