What are you trying to prove?
Lilydale Airport is open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day; not many airfields around Australia can boast that.
The activity you saw is about the same as I've seen when driving past a few hundred times over the past 30 years - usually nothing flying or maybe one on the ground and one in the circuit.
Part of the reason these days is that permission is required from an employee of the airport and cannot be obtained on CTAF, so they are contolling runway maintenance for those based at the field.
RVAC moved their flying school out of Coldstream a few years ago.
Both airports are a long way from a comparison with Bankstown which is what this thread is about.
We established that:
Bankstown had 243,126 annual movements in 2011 and 248,000 in 2017
Moorabbin 295,000 (800/day in 2023)
Van Nuys, California had 300,000 in 2023
So our metropolitan airports are roughly on a par with California
If it comes to observations, I sat around Gunnedah Airport for an hour and only heard cockatoos squawking; I parked the caravan on another one for an afternoon and a morning and nobody came.
People are entitled to make their own business decisions, and operate however it produces a profit.
What we found earlier in the thread is that light aircraft operation is much different today compared to 40 years ago, so no point in trying to go back to the past with the old ex WW2 concepts.
As of 26/1/24 RAA had:
6,300 active pilots (GA PPL and RPL: 10804)
3232 aircraft
160 Flight Schools
29 Affiliated Clubs
That's where the action is.