It’s a vicious circle, I believe: Lack of popularity results in less coverage, less coverage results in lack of popularity.
Some thoughts on that:
Compared to other DAWs, there is very little in the way of video tutorials, both for novice and intermediate users. The official tutorial video is for 2.8, and a couple years old, and that’s only for beginners. How much current educational Renoise video material is out there? How many videos that introduce, in detail, the new stuff in Renoise 3 and show how to use it?
Ease of learning is relevant, and probably one of the bigger issues. The traditional way of learning a tracker was to load up modules/songs and analyze them. That’s the same way people learned how to program in the eighties and nineties, too. But times have changed and many folks want (and expect) to be shown things. That’s where Youtube videos come in.
Every other DAW has a ton of up-to-date videos. If you want to get started with, say, FL Studio, you go to Seamless’ channel and watch the dozens of quality tutorials which cover a large number of topics. And if that’s not enough, you can watch hours worth of “track from scratch” videos. When I wanted to learn Reaper, I went to Groove3, dropped $30 for a tutorial series, and that got me up to speed. For Renoise, there isn’t much material, free or otherwise.
Differently put, if there is a large body of tutorial-style material, people get through the “wtf do I do?” stage quickly and start making music right away. (Very visual DAWs like FL, Live, and Bitwig are also more intuitive to the average person.) Commercial sites and “the press” want to make money: clicks, page views, visitors. They can help making a DAW popular, but they also respond to what’s in demand. So if they advertise something for a bit, but the demand for info doesn’t really pick up, they focus on something else. It’s easier to sell something flashy like Bitwig.
Sharing songs made with Renoise is nice, but let’s face it, you can do most songs with any of the big DAWs. Often, the plugins are the same anyway. So it comes down to other things: ease of learning and available resources, workflow (videos on what makes a tracker workflow great), and community.
I think those of you with advanced Renoise knowledge could probably make a real difference (and perhaps even earn e-fame! ) if you sat down and started to make how-to videos. But that’s work and there are probably some self-esteem issues to overcome (“My voice sounds like shit!”, “I have a strong accent, no one understands me!”, “I suck at teaching!”, etc.).
Besides all of that, maybe trackers are simply a niché that will never again be as a relevant as they were twenty plus years ago. Bit like text adventures.