I went raving in Eindhoven in Holland last weekend and the best option for everyone seemed to be a drum 'n' bass night. It's been about 8 years since I last paid any attention to drum 'n' bass other than a bit of ragga jungle and breakcore.
It's all very... flat... these days, isn't it? Very linear interpretations of tech-step, but a bit cleaned up. No mad chopped-up beats, not even that many big fat b-lines.
Flat is probably the best word for it - I think they've all got to processing the beats to make them hit harder to the extent that the drums just chug along at a constant level forever. And the 'deep' mainstream stuff is even worse in this respect than the 'hard' mainstream stuff because the word 'tasteful' has crept into its vocabulary. I think there might still be mainstream techstep stuff with messed up beats - Limewax and Noisia for intance - but I've not been looking that hard.
Subvert Central is definitely a good place to check though. There's loads of interesting stuff still happening in the margins.
I don't know how things got this way, but I've got half a theory about why they're staying that way - specifically, it seems like people have got very very good at producing reeses and two step beats, to the extent that attempting to try something else is going to sound a bit amateurish until people get better at it. But from a dancefloor / mainstream appeal point of view that means it never picks up critical mass.
Also, I think the very definite mainstream / underground split means that a lot of people who might inject something more interesting into the mainstream just ignore it entirely.
I'm not sure about the studentyness thing - most of the student dnb nights I used to go to were full of trustafarians who went nuts for oldskool amen mashups.
Hmmm... wasn't there a Blissblog a while back about the Zone of Fruitless Intensification that had a fairly good stab at explaining What Went Wrong?
Oh yeah and what is that "Tarantula" tune?
Cheesy genius is what it is.
Y'know what sucks even more? Breaks.
I think I like breaks less than any other genre I can think of. It just seems to be dance music shorn of any of the extremes of speed, bass, cheese, rage, sexiness, noise, minimalism, funk, intensity or anything else that actually make dance music interesting...