You know what? This exact thing happened to me. I bought Starcraft the year it came out with my allowance money (I was still in middle school at the time). I used to think that competitive play was the only reason to play Starcraft. I clocked somewhere between 2000 and 3000 hours in total playing online. I was actually pretty good playing as Protoss. I played some official ladder matches, and I got pretty far up the leader boards. Then I realized I wasn't having fun anymore. I would win most of my matches, but it ceased to give me any feeling of accomplishment. Even then, I would sometimes play pros who had created new accounts to hide their win/loss records, I would get steamrolled and I would feel like crap afterwards.
But I didn't quit playing. Yeah sure, I quit playing competitively. I played to simply to have fun again. You see, I had heard about how the map editor could be used to alter the gameplay in major ways. I decided to go back online and see if people had come up with anything interesting. Holy crap, they sure had. It was then that I got my first exposure to turret/cannon/spore colony defense. Then came my favorite 4-way defense. I remember my thoughts after I played my first Dragonball Z themed map, "Oh my God, this is AWESOME!"
So basically my response to this article is, "You should have stopped playing competitively and start trying to have fun." I gotta be honest, I'll be mildly interested in competitive play once Starcraft 2 comes out, but it won't be my main reason for getting it. My reason? The defense maps, the DoTA maps, the Gundam themed maps.