Most of the users of Winlink tend to be people who are low budget blue water sailors who can't afford satellite voice and data services. These people tend to use it regularly if not daily for routine, free comm's between them and non-hams. This sort of thing rides right on the edge of acceptable use in many ways (non-commercial use, automated stations, interference, etc.) and Winlink users are often vilified by other hams. Personally I'm OK with it, I like to see good come out of the hobby instead of it just being a hobby for hobby's sake.

The rest the world doesn't really need it. I got into Winmor, pretty seriously, actually, being a sysop and all, because I was a new ham and had just gone through an ice storm where I was without any means of electronic communications for <gasp> 3 or 4 hours! The horror! It was a good exercise for me because it made me realize that ham radio was unlikely to be a solution to any of my emergency communications needs, ever.

Think about it. You get a bad natural disaster of some kind. Your are either bugging in or bugging out. If you are bugging out you are going to some place that has comm's. If you are bugging in, made a bad choice, don't have comm's and now need help, assuming your equipment isn't wrecked and you have power to run it, you call someone on the radio. That doesn't require the complexity of Winlink. So Winlink just becomes a convenience item for sending "I'm OK" message to your friend and family who, if you are like most hams, are all non-hams.

However, by the time you take care of all of the other things associated with storm survival, get the station fired up, send the messages, etc. by then it's more than likely that the cellular network is back up. That has happened to me so many times now I don't even bother to think about Winlink anymore. If you are in something the magnitude of Katrina it might have some worth. However even then most hams, being relatively intelligent people (most, anyway ), run away from such trouble or avoid it all together. That means in a Katrina the number of people who are actually capable of running Winlink over HF and actually need to is probably close to zero. So not a lot of "market" there, either.

Finally we have the "helpers". The hams that run towards trouble with a truck full of equipment. Without getting into a discussion of whether they are even needed in the first place, why they don't use Winlink almost exclusively is a bit beyond me, except to say that there is a lot of latency associated with it compared to just using voice comm's.

Personally I made a choice to live somewhere that does not have earthquakes, tornadoes, big hurricanes, massive fires or floods (unless you are stupid enough to buy somewhere that is prone to flooding, which people still do––"Oh, it's so pretty by the river..." ) We do get big snows and ice storms, but we've had so many that the cellular infrastructure is now robust enough to be restored within hours if it even goes down at all and the 4G infrastructure almost makes you not care if cable goes out. That said the cable-internet infrastructure is pretty good too, as with all that insulated wire only actual snapped lines cause faults. The power infrastructure is always hard hit, though, but I've got a generator and enough fuel for 90 days on hand if I need it. Longest so far was 104 hours, which isn't that bad, actually. It's not unusual for some to be on generator for 2 weeks. But us New England Yankee types are hardy and self-sufficient. We don't complain, we just grab an extra blanket and throw another log on the fire or in the stove!