Roleplay Theory and Discussion, How can we keep players engaged? Options

[Ryuga]

So the status of the Roleplaying Subforum hasn't improved as much as I would have liked. We've injected our ideas into the community, and yet things are reverting to the old stagnant state.
So I thought we should discuss some common problems we've been seeing, and possibly re-evaluate how we design Roleplays.

Some of the issues that I've been thinking about recently are:

The Hand of God
The GM's seem to have trouble balancing just how much control they exert over the RP. Recently I've been seeing more cases of activity decline because the GM does an inadequate job of steering the plot in the right direction. This leaves players wandering what they should do and eventually activity drops off. The Crossover RP and Holy Shield seem guilty of this.

Then we have the reverse, where the GM puts far too much control of the plot, leaving players to act like lifelessa marinoettes. (Sorry guys over at the DRYH RP. I'm especially guilty of this.)

Then there is the issue of Player Initiative.
Sort of the reverse of the Hand of God Problem. In every RP there is always the fear of being the leader, as players don't want to screw up the plot, or enter God-mod territory. Unfortunately that leaves players just hanging around waiting for someone else to do something. (Yeah, not saying I'm not guilty of this either)
An example of this would be the Persona RP, the most recent one. That one died off when no one wanted to be the hero, and we all stood around waiting for the damn monster to die.

An RP that didn't fall into this trap was The Black Chivalry. Since Trickster fell off the face of the planet midway, we just improvised and made everything up as we went along. And it was glorius.

The Booms and Busts of Fight Scenes

Something I seem to observe is that RP's tend to die right after our mid-climax fight scenes. No one wants to write about character development or revelation following this, usually, peak in RP activity, and things just stop.
Persona 4: The second case, and the TWEWY RP are examples off the top of my head.

So what do you guys think of these pitfalls? Do you see any other repeating mistakes in the RP's you participate in? And do you have any ideas on how we would solve these problems.

Discuss.

[Trickster]

It may seem like I appeared and then disappeared, but that's not the case. I just don't know how to incorporate Tom into what's happening right now in Boat Trip. Anyway, I'm definitely up for a collaboration roleplay.