As someone outside the US, I think the cost of Las Vegas is only a small aspect of the slump. When you factor in the cost of flights and other destinations you may be visiting, Vegas being expensive is often only driving up the total trip cost proportionately.
There have been several situations in the last 12 months where the desire to go to the US (and Vegas, in this case, for conferences) just isn't there, as we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US, due to the current Government. Anecdotally, this has been the reason I've heard from Canadians who are also considering travel to the same conferences.
The Beatles (especially John) also hated the tedium of re-recording vocals to layer them, as is common in audio production to improve the impact of vocals in recordings.
Their engineer ended up coming up with a technical approach we call ADT (Automatic double-tracking) to artificially duplicate and layer the vocals without requiring the artist(s) to re-record vocals.
Many years ago I operated the largest nationwide online DVD rental business in my country. Our warehousing evolved from alphabetical to numerical, with layout changes along the way. Eventually we handed the rearchiving of DVDs to the database itself and allowed it to allocate blocks of scanned in DVDs that were being returned. New content also was allocated by this system.
It was incredibly fun seeing things like cached new releases going straight to dispatch rather than going into the warehouse. Blocks of returning stock would be allocated to warehouse sections that had gaps that had the physical size of the block of DVDs that were being checked in.
Obviously, those empty areas were most commonly rotating stock, so over time the warehouse would become more active in areas, requiring a reallocation of stock to allow walking lanes for picking staff to not become congested. Fun times and all done on early Dell AXIMs with upgraded batteries, red laser scanners, and this new thing called wifi.
There have been several situations in the last 12 months where the desire to go to the US (and Vegas, in this case, for conferences) just isn't there, as we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US, due to the current Government. Anecdotally, this has been the reason I've heard from Canadians who are also considering travel to the same conferences.