Scanlators who love the series they work with don't do that. They're trying to make the series as popular as possible, and dropping it countermands that goal.
Scanlators who do it for solely for their epeen, on the other hand, will however drop it for those reasons. They're getting paid with cheap flattery, and they lust for minor celebrity status in their blogs and forums. Good riddance to those attention whores when they leave the scanning scene, as they're one of its many cancers.

You're a little confused. Attention to the scanlator's person is not the same as attention to the work. A scanlator (or, more specifically, a translator) who loves a series can just read it without translating it for others. If you translate it, it means you want others to read it. If they give you no indication that they read it and/or enjoy it, then it's pointless -- you might as well drop this project and pick up something new.

Even if there are scanlators who simply seek attention to themselves, a drop is still a drop, and it results in leechers stuck with a series in an incomplete status. I doubt they'd appreciate you preaching to them how it's good for the "scene".

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I'm pretty decent at Chinese, though traditional Chinese takes me a while to read(cuz I never learnt it and I have to sound out words)
usually the series I like are already translated into Chinese, but I'm screwed over when the original is Korean :/
I can sound out and look up hiragana, and kanji usually aren't a problem. I can get the gist of it if I can finally jap. Raw. Just takes a dang long time

Gotta say, it is fairly difficult trying to get groups interested in scanlating a dropped project. Or at least it is with my experience, you have to find the right group to suggest it to, and even then they may or may not pick it up, especially not when you don't know where to find raws.

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Mmm....I don't usually find out a manga is dropped until months later probably. My patience has grown over the years. After that, I ask other groups to pick it up. And rarely I finds raws/look up summaries. But waiting patiently is basically what I do. In those cases I hope another group picks it up or it gets published in North America. Luckily favorite series are few and far between.

I'd say it's fairly impossible. Groups are always running at near 100% capacity, and when they have spare capacity, they already have something in mind they're going to pick up. An ideal situation would be where there is one common potential project list for the whole community with enough information to judge if this project would be worthwhile, contributed by the interested readers. But nothing like that exists, so we have the current unsatisfactory situation.

So the best bet at this time is to do what you can to make sure the series you care about don't get dropped in the first place.

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Lol nice poll this week! As for me, I voted for the first option, but the reality is 'two or more of the above'. First, I despair; then I find the raws and look at the pretty pictures, with my own imaginings of what's going on in the story (usually I am right... more or less)!

Zipang comes to mind. That anime is the reason why I stopped watching anime altogether. You often don't get even close to the full story.

I buy the raws, wait for a while, and then start scanlating if another group fails to pick up the ball. I am doing this with three series (Boku no Marie, Neko Ane and Koi Neko) already, and have two more such series waiting in the wings. One of these days I will realize my own limits and throttle back a bit... 🤨

You know, I think there is a group that has something like a project list like you suggest. I can't actually remember the group name, but what the group does is that it has a list of projects and translators/proofers/qc'ers/etc pick and choose what they want to work on for however long they want and go from there. It's quite an interesting concept, though again, raws.

Aside: Just saw that you're a part of the group that does Capeta, thanks soooo much for that, I love Capeta.

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