same death as OpenSolaris?
It looks like OmniOS died for the same exact reason that OpenSolaris never really took off. From the OP:
However, even with the success we have had, there is one area we have failed to make progress on, which is the goal of making OmniOS community operated. There are many factors why this hasn't happened, but ultimately in five years of both ups and downs within OmniTI, I am left to conclude that if we are ever to change the nature of OmniOS, we need to take a radical approach.
And that is exactly what happened to OpenSolaris: it never became a self-sustaining, collaborative open development project. From the outset, OpenSolaris was a Sun marketing exercise, under Sun's complete and freakish control, and remained so throughout its existence.
Sun management together with Solaris engineering never gave up total and complete control of the project. Neither of them had any real intention of doing so to begin with, for ideological reasons. Both were convinced that Solaris was the best thing invented since sliced bread, and nothing will ever change that.
OpenSolaris' CDDL license was incompatible with the GPL. Consequence: say goodbye to all the useful hardware drivers that Solaris Intel badly needed, but were now inaccessible because of licensing conflicts. Concerned OpenSolaris community shareholder-citizens were advising Sun about not releasing Solaris source code under GPL. In their view, GPL licensed software would somehow dilute shareholder value. Take a look at RedHat and let us know how that worked out.
Never mind that, by that time, Linux was already vastly and fundamentally better than Solaris in many ways. Solaris was already fading into death by abandonment because of stagnation and staleness.
It took Sun more than two years to create an openly accessible source code respository and SCM for OpenSolaris. Which was, for all practical purposes, read-only. A real open source project can set up a source code repo in less than a week.
The "open collaboration" that Sun pretended to wax about with OpenSolaris consisted of little more than pointless - and often idiotic - email discussions on several mailing lists.
Free and Open Source development is a very cruel and unforgiving endeavor. Either one does it right, or one dies.
In the end, it doesn't matter. Solaris is now a niche and dying platform, of interest only to Oracle - if that. Where exactly is the interest in an obscure fork of a dead platform.