You're right about that, it's an entirely different community now because of the money that is there to be made, most of the guys who were here for the tech are probably relaxing on a beach somewhere by now. You can go to certain sections of the forum and find lots of good threads to discuss things, serious/technical discussion would be a good start.
Not necessarily. A lot of these people cashed out when bitcoin hit $1-100. Then even more at $1000. It's the ones that hodled and timed it right selling at the all time high that are probably on the beaches. I think the majority of posters now just dump their coins for cash as soon as they get it because for a lot of them it's seemingly paying their bills.
Yep but they didn't need to be in from beginning to end to still be on the beaches somewhere. If they invested only around 10k then that would mean that each 100x we would have a whole new bunch of millionaires and then they could sell to the next lot of hopefuls. That means we've already had 3+ lots of millionaires using that logic.