Yeah.. BTC-e is doing a real great job, given how heavily they were attacked.. and things seem to be going pretty well. Of course, they gotta try to get back some trade volume that is maybe 1/4 of what it should be, but given the circumstances, they may be able to build that trade volume back up, if they can stay away from the USA govt from seizing any of their assets, again.
Everything needs to come from their non English following, which happens to be mostly Russians supporting that exchange no matter what, due to the lack of proper alternatives.
I must however point out that the volumes wex is generating look very suspicious, in the way of wex itself, or whatever other entity is trying to make that exchange look more active than it in reality is.
Only time will tell whether or not it will manage to regain its old status in the market, but I highly doubt it. Their only chance to potentially achieve this, is when they buy back the tokens at spot value 1:1.
Surely there is considerable loss of confidence, and part of that has to do with how this started in the first place - the seizure of several of their assets. It is quite laudable for them to come back from that kind of situation and to attempt to open back up and to create a system that attempts to make whole their users. Surely they had an opportunity to exit scam on a big level, and conspiracy assertions that they trying to further scam people do not add up.
The lower their trade volume and the more that customers exit their system (and I concede that it seems that a lot of customers have abandoned), the longer that it is going to take for them to pay back 1:1 of the outstanding tokens. You are expecting way too fucking much if you think that they can just come back and pay everyone, when they created a system that will allow them to track the losses and to accomplish such payback in the future, which they have already said that they will do.
Sure there is likely some fake volume and manipulation, but that goes on with any exchange and there is more likely for such manipulation with lower volume and with a variety of tokens and surely they could manipulate to such an extent that they are able to buy back tokens at the relatively low prices of .4-ish, and then reimburse folks 1 - which ends up being an immediate .6 profit... Certainly, as a business they should be taking advantage of such situations to the extent that they are able to; however, their taking advantage of such situations and loss of confidence, does not indicate that they are purposefully causing such loss of confidence in order to deflate the value of their tokens (because in essence such would be a double edged sword, and they need to be able to balance such practices, if they would be in a place for such negative manipulation).
Anyhow, part of my point is that there is no need to overly read malevolence coming from BTC-e, even when there is a lot of that kind of bullshit conspiracy talk out there, and I am sure that they are continuing to struggle, and as you say time will tell whether they are able to make the exchange sufficiently "successful" again, in spite of what appears to be considerable ongoing loss of confidence. I have decent confidence that they will win back a sufficient following and increase their business and pay back old customers, and all of this takes time. A monkey wrench in this whole thing could be if the USA Govt is able to again disrupt their business or if they were to have some unfortune of a severe security breach.
Like you said, time will tell, time will tell.