Where there is a market, there will be a product. What I find far more intriguing to contemplate than big boats/small boats is what I think will be a huge change in the market for "stuff."
The boatbuilders today are riding the coat-tails of the baby-boom generation. Right now they're the ones with money and the desire to spend it on "big stuff." They are the ones who carried the American dream flag on the final leg of its journey. The house, the cars, the secure job with good pay, good pensions, and so on.
I think it's all going to change and change very fast as the baby boomers die off at an accelerating rate.
With the current exception of the tech industries, the fields that offered Americans good, steady, well-paying jobs, pensions, etc. are fading fast. For example the pension plan at the company I work for, Boeing, is ending at the end of this month. "Legacy" employees still have their pensions but they will no longer acquire "time" after December 31st. Instead the company will contribute more to an employee's 401K plan-- for awhile. But even this is going to be scaled back over the next few years. From here forward all employees hired by this company, including employees who were hired within the last x-years, will have no pension at all.
What used to be considered well-paying jobs and careers are increasingly being moved to other countries and regions with equal (or higher) productivity and quality but lower costs.
While it's more a discussion for OTDE, I think the day of the "affluent" average American is drawing to a close. I am meeting more and more people in the age range of 22 to 30 who make but a fraction of what I made when I was the same age and that's allowing for inflation and the changing value of the dollar. It's not that these folks are dumb or incapable, it's that the huge variety of jobs that were available to me are no longer available to them.
What this does to the boat-manufacturing market remains to be seen, but I suspect the business model they have been pursuing that has led them to produce ever-larger and more expensive boats is going to fade away, at least in this country. The market that will develop for those Americans who are interested in boating--- and where that number goes is a whole other topic--- will be for boats this emerging market can afford. And when discretionary income goes down it affects what companies build and try to sell.
So the trick is not to try to figure out what the boat makers will do. They'll do-- or at least try to do-- what the market dictates. The trick is to figure out how, as the country moves from the current normal to the new normal, this will affect the boat-buying market.
My gut feel is that it's not going to be pretty. But for the boat manufacturers I think there is a silver lining to all this. As Americans' buying power descends, the buying power in the regions that are increasingly doing the kind of work that used to be done here will see their buying power increase.
China is a great example of this. A few years ago I spent two months working in Xiamen, a smallish city on an island connected the southeast mainland by a set of bridges. Xiamen happens to be the location of the Nordhavn plant that builds the larger models.
For a lot of reasons, Xiamen is booming. New upmarket housing developments, some with man-made lagoons and waterways and docks. There were SeaRay billboards all over the place. The city boasted Ferrari, Maserati, Bentley, and Land Rover/Range Rover dealerships and Porsches were scurrying around like cockroaches.
So for the upmarket boat manufacturers, if they keep abreast of the global shifting of their market, they have the potential to keep right on doing what they're doing but for buyers other than Americans as that market slowly dies.