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I feel that the 'real' SF has been dying for years. The 'golden years' in the 50's-70's and declining after that. Even there there was already a myriad of different styles and subgenres. Hard-SF (real science playing a major part) is almost gone now. Largely because it seems that writers either lack the actual science knowledge or do not have real visionairy ideas. It seems that SF is more a peg to hang a story on and a lot of writers use SF as synonym for future-placed.
It is more complex than that in my opinion. What about, just an example, the books from Tim Powers like 'The Anubis Gates' or 'Expiration Date'. Is it SF? Horror? Fantasy? Something else? I feel that those also fall under the SF umbrella. For me SF is not only about the 'science' anymore and it was also not the case in the golden years. A lot of good SF books back then had no real science component in them or did not play an important part. Even for books from the great SF writers of the day that was the case. Take for example Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Robert A. Heinlein, Philip K. Dick. In a lot of their stories SF is 'just' a setting. The SF paint was applied on a detective novel for example.
If you really drill down to the core, there are only that much types of stories that can be told. The rest is paint to make it more pretty. SF is not so much a genre as paint.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of SF/(Urban) Fantasy/etc myself and I will be.
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