I kinda agree with you. But my view is not as extreme as yours.
The really REALLY hardcore Axl-fans still care a great deal. You see it on various boards and on comments on FB and Twitter.
Whenever DJ tries to sell you stuff via his posts, it gets hundreds and thousands of "likes" and comments.

The fact that Axl doesn't seem to play ball (or even wants to) with his own label is not a good sign. Well, it's not a good sign if your dream is to see GNR/Axl on top of the world again. I mean, setting up interviews and apperances on major outlets (TV, radio, print) requires a highly proffesional team of know-how people with connections all over the biz. And I guess Beta, Del, Fernando and Jarmo doesn't seem to cut it. And Azoff was apperantly shooting for something else, I do believe that.

Axl said early on that he wanted GNR to be as big as they could get. But when that happened and the UYI-tours were over, he didn't seem to actually ever want to "go there" again. There is not a mob of fans waiting outside his hotel anymore (unless he's in South America) and he seems to like it that way.

Axl will continue to be a rockstar in the sense that people will go see GNR in concert as long as he keeps touring and releasing music on a regular basis in some form or another. If that ends up beeing stadium, arenas or club shows, it doesn't matter to me and my belief is that it doesen't matter to Axl. It may even end up where the income of a tour is not enough to pay his bandmembers and that he just ends up releasing music whenever he sees fit and that's that!

At the current stage of his career, my guess is that he is somehow shackled by the fact that he owes X-amount of albums to a major label. And getting out of that "mess" is not easy when you're butting heads over how you want things to be rolled out.
Back when I was storemanager at a recordstore (around '06), I asked one of the top guys at Universal about what he could tell me about the new GNR album. He just looked at me with a combination of dissapointment/amusement and said: "We've had money put aside for that album for 5 years!! I have no idea!"
And that's coming from a Universal executive in little Norway. I can't even imagine the level of frustration from executives in major markets like the US....

Axl would prolly love to be in some kind of Trent Reznor/NIN type situation and being able to do things similar to what Bumblefoot have suggested.

Fine by me!

I still listen to Chinese Democracy on a regular basis, even though a casual rockfan couldn't name me two songs off of that album!