If you were to apply statistical significance / trend tests on the data, all it would show is that CW is alive and well, Phone is alive and well, HF is alive and well, VHF is alive and well, HF SSB is alive and well etc etc etc.
Taste? That’s a strange remark. You don’t do CW, so your preference for phone is not based on taste, or a belief that there is something more sociable and personable about the spoken word. It is based on what is available to you. There is a notorious character who comes up periodically on a local repeater round here, who insists that talking is far superior because it conveys much more about emotion, sentiment, humour etc through the rhythm of the speech and the intonation of the voice. I have argued that all this is similarly conveyed by good CW ops as well, but he struggles to understand that point. Of course, he himself does not do CW.
Anyway, I came into this on a Class B licence and still have my Class B prefix, it’s the only callsign I have ever held. I noticed all this extra SOTA I couldn’t chase because it was on CW - so I learned CW. I found the best way to learn CW was by being very cheeky and doing CW SOTA activations, right on 7.032MHz, at 10wpm!
Same goes for datamodes as well. You can ignore it and not join in, or you can do something about it, get an interface and some freeware, and get going on PSK31 (etc).
You could go back to QRZ and eHam and offer Andy’s figures, as evidence that their fears are unfounded. A quick snapshot of today’s spots shows a very even split between CW and SSB on HF, with 65 SSB spots, and 63 for CW (in compact view).
Another trend you could track is the raw number of HF SSB activations in each year of SOTA since its inception. This would show significant year-on-year growth, so people who find CW distasteful just need to put it from their minds and focus on the ever increasing opportunities to chase HF SSB SOTA activations.
Roy G4SSH clearly cannot do SSB. But you never find him complaining about all the SSB activations, and furthermore, he still manages to be the world’s leading chaser!
Tom M1EYP