LTC needs to be well maintained and with many supporting vendor integration tools if is to have any chance of long-term growth in its fundamental value. People need to use it as an actual medium of exchange for commerce instead of the manic-depressive speculation vehicle it currently is. In support of this goal, it seems logical for large holders of LTC to donate a small portion to a long-term development effort if they want the rest of their holdings to have a better chance of growing in value. More important than the holders of LTC are the exchanges of LTC. They are the ones currently making profits from LTC trade. They have an interest in the network being better maintained and the client more stable, because if chain accidents happen they can potentially be defrauded of a significant amount of money by double-spending theft.
And yeah, I totally agree with this. However, if the people who actually have a large stake in LTC don't care about the coin anymore, then I don't see why anyone should.
I'll tell you right now, if someone else made a new clone coin by porting scrypt to the 8.1 client, I'd wager it would immediately take off due to LTC's stagnation.
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=alltime&resolution=day&pair=ftc-btc&market=btc-e
Here's one of the typical pump-and-dump scam clone coins that steal money from people dumb enough to buy it during the initial mining bubble. You will notice in this chart that the early miners made thousands of BTC with this pump-and-dump scheme, which triggered a massive increase in hashrate as more idiots piled on. As soon as the difficulty was too high and the price had plummeted, the coin fully collapsed with not enough miners to sustain confirmations. The leadership of this scam then tried to lure back miners with the promise of BTC bounties, which helped them to push it along slowly toward a smaller difficulty drop introduced in a mandatory hardfork client update. Even after the adjusted client they are again now stuck with falling hashrate, the scam now having fully run its course.
The miners don't care about the long-term safety of the network. So it would make no difference for the scam coin to be based on 0.6.x or 0.8.x.