Indeed!
Oh, btw... back then the Spit 16 had >10% of all kills, and the LA7 7.5%. Now they have ~6 and ~4 %. Just some info for the "everything was better in the old days" crowd 
I'd say the drop in LA7 usage came from the last update of it. If you look in Jan of this year (tour 96)
LA7 had 33,201 kills and a K:D of 1.2538
LA5 had 4,696 kills and a K:D of 1.0154
Nik2 had 29,781 kills and a K:D of 1.2510
Now the last tour the LA7 (Tour 102)
LA7 had 17,449 kills and a K:D of 0.8446
LA5 had 1,592 kills and a K:D of 1.0764
Nik2 had 34,399 kills and a K:D of 1.2664
If you notice both LA's dropped way down in kills stats and the LA7 kill death ratio dropped way down. The Nik2 kills went up slightly but not enough to show that many more are flying it. I looked back to tour 83 and stats were pretty close to the same precentages as tour 96. This shows that the LA7 fell out of flavor after the update.
IMO it's because the plane is no longer as uber as it once was, which is why they don't bug me so much anymore. I didn't fly the LA7 much then, so I can't guage it's preformace before the update, but I do know the new LA5 is much harder to fly than the older one. Stats show this now because LA5 kills are only 1/5th of what they used to be and LA7 kills are down by about 50%. That's a major change and shows people moved away from those aircraft, most likely because the plane wasn't so uber anymore.
Now all those LA kills went somewhere.. most likely they spread out among various rides, but it would be nice to see the same thing happen to the Nik2 & Spit16 in order to ballence out the MA.