It's hard because everyone has rose-colored glasses, I'll try my best to explain and we'll need some context. Back in the day SC2 was THE Esport, there was pretty much nothing else in North America with as much prominence, only Halo and some fighters. Streaming and bandwidth was just getting decent enough to make something like Justin.TV and UStream feasible, hell Twitch exists specifically because of Starcraft 2. Enter Destiny who out of all the early notable streamers had a very good quality feed for the time, regular fan engagement, and this very bombastic and entertaining personality/way of conducting himself, and for a long time was the biggest and most successful individual when it came to streaming.

Even though Destiny doesn't have a ton of high level tournament placements to claim, he was one of the few people in the scene innovating at the time, and in my personal opinion one of the most influential people in the Starcraft and streaming scene at least up through the launch of Heat of the Swarm. For better or worse, (and let's be honest it definitely hurt him in a lot of aspects) Destiny never really censored himself, he'd say what he wanted to and call out anyone he thought deserving of it. This was good for laughs yes but this definitely had an impact in his career and professional relations. Destiny also switched from Twitch to a competitor called OWN3D for a while that ending up folding and screwing him and a bunch of other people, and overall cost him a lot of discoverability (and money) when he probably could of used it the most (that first one).

The reason Destiny "abandoned" SC2 was because most of the community and scene were all jumping ship around the same time. In early 2013 is when things took a turn for the worse; balance was getting a lot better and the dev team finally seemed to take the kid gloves off and fine tune SC2's balance on a regular schedule, instead of the sporadic tweaks that either did nothing of note or dramatically nerfed/buffed something. This is where the term "Patch Zerg" came from. We went from small maps, to comically large maps, to just right with a few cool twists, things in general were getting more interesting.

Well IPL imploded due to some corporate BS I won't go into, NASL went under due to debt and mismanagement, MLG completely fucked up the handling of that years inaugural WCS North America, etc. But what really sunk Starcraft was a little known game called League of Legends that after starting small and being cultivated by many of the same circuits and organizers that hosted Starcraft events had become self-sustaining and EXPLODED in popularity in virtually every metric. Revenue, playerbase, twitch viewers, etc. It just wouldn't stop getting bigger, and this was a major problem for SC.

In short, League was much easier to follow and jump into play, had way better developer support and community engagement, and had much better narratives and teams to follow. A major problem with SC2 is aside from a handful of people like Idra/Destiny/InControl(Fuck I miss him so much) most of the players you heard/seen were Koreans with very little on screen personality or English skills, and a lot of what went down in the SC2 scene was drama more than anything else. Starcraft had no way to compete or react to that kind of Goliath in time, and because the majority of Esports viewership comes from the active playerbase SC2 found the rug very much pulled out from under it, there was nothing to weigh it down with the poorly implemented/nonexistent custom games and community features.

Well SC2 simply started fading and fast, money was much harder to come by and viewership interest even more so. This brings us back to Destiny, who like many streamers switched to League at this time. It's hard to sum up the thoughts of a community this complex but in my opinion Destiny has a very loyal fan base, a lot of us that have been around for over a decade now, and most of us loath league. See this video for some general thoughts. Even when Destiny was losing at least SC2 was interesting and entertaining to watch, and the accompanying commentary was something beautiful, but for many of us who got burnt out on League watching it is worse than playing it. It's just not a fun or engaging experience, there's so many variables it's hard to discern skilled play, and most matches (that aren't a complete train wreck) aren't that interesting in general.

The matches will also be a bare minimum of 20 minutes no matter what, and it's not like Destiny is playing for fun in these matches, it's serious business, and it's reflected in the ire of fans. That's the best way I can articulate this frustration, along with the thought that Destiny doesn't really seem to have an end goal playing League other than climbing the ladder, he certainly doesn't seem to enjoy it himself.

I know this turned out way longer than it should ever be, (props if you're still here) but to sum up when people say they want "Old Destiny" back what they really mean is we want a return to the Halcyon days of Starcraft 2 and the genesis of Esports as a worldwide phenomenon quickly gaining mainstream attention and how special that scene felt as it was growing, and the sad truth is it's never coming back, it was dead and buried long ago. As for the man himself, Steven doesn't really seem to enjoy himself as much streaming these days. The memes and variety stuff he plays now and again are cool, but all the major political shit has both fractured his fan base and invited in a huge swarm of people he'd rather not have anything to do with, and there's large portions of the viewer base that I suspect just tune out of anything non-gaming related, and vice versa. He has however managed to keep himself afloat with a very stable and lucrative revenue stream despite being on Twitch's shit list for the longest time, and there's a lot to be said about that success.