Are User Groups Eliminating the Need for Mid-Sized .Net Conferences?

I’ve been thinking about this very topic since VSLive NYC and was wondering what others think about this.  VSLive in NYC (formerlyVBits) was a must attend event back before .Net, but I was definitely under whelmed at the turnout for the last couple years.  Last year, with the bad economy, I thought it was a fluke, but this year didn’t seem much better, and the economy (at least in the NYC metro area) is a whole lot better.  But in looking at the sessions I realized that there really wasn’t much there of interest to me.  And that is when it hit me.  If you went every month to one of the many .Net user groups in the NYC area, plus spent a little time reading the blogs, there was very little reason to go to an event like VSLive.  Most of the VSLive presenters also speak at local user groups (thanks to INETA) and the local MSDN events, and they also have very good blogs, so this material is available elsewhere for free.  Smaller conferences (like Chris Sells Dev Con), where the attendance is just around 100 people, allow for much better “real world developer” to “real world developer” interaction.  The larger events, like TechEd or VSLive SanFran, are appealing because they offer a larger selection of sessions, plus the .Net gods usually speak at these events.  So the medium sized events of yesteryear (the traveling tech conferences) do not leave much to offer the average developer.  They were geared toward the developers that couldn’t afford the travel budget needed to get to the large conferences, but still needed to learn the latest/greatest.  Now with the proliferation of excellent local user groups and/or other internet resources, this niche market seems to be eroding quickly.