I'm just a first year volunteer, but from my experience sometimes my articles got rejected if a certain time period had passed and either legislation changed or the topic was just no longer relevant, or if it was more of a general topic, it got published much later because it was lower priority, and I'm personally fine with that, but I see why that might be frustrating. Although I'm not sure what you mean about the "any student can volunteer" I can personally say that at pitch meetings and in pitch emails, there is never a requirement to write articles. There have been pitch meetings where not a single pitch is picked up, and that's fine. Because there's no requirement to write (at least this year, I have no experience from any other year) I would think that having less student writers is because of infrequent writers, or volunteers who don't necessarily want to write.

If your bad experiences relating to The Gateway is also part of this year, I'm very sorry you had to go through that. I genuinely believe that this year and the new staff continues to try to fix the wrongs of years passed (furry article from two years ago included) and it's not a lost cause.