Today the world is a commercial play ground. Everything revolves around what you can convince and sell to others as the next best thing since sliced bread. What is not advertised is not known and what is not known is not used and what is not used is not liked. To advertise needs money, money sells more money. If you don't put money in it no one bothers with it. Even poor students dont believe in free things and view them with suspicion and probably imagine they not as good , why else would they be free.
No money in the project leaves it as a hobbyists interest ( I can attest to that, I live in Africa. People, students, IT techs here would rather use a buggy, pirated M$ WinBlows than the best free OS in the world)
The solution here is to get a benevolent investor keen on selling their product bundled with a free and spify well oiled software( Which Elive is) e.g manufacturer of computor hardware, an online business that deals in software that runs on linux. I.e we need to sell the goodness of Elive to the investor/promoter/ or benevolent money bags.....not to the ordinary folk; the ordinary folk follow the dreams of the moneybags investor and want to associate with the things he associates with i.e Elive
Next, we need to make Elive look modern: E16 looks daaaaateeed , Buttery smooth ,eye-candy display sells more than an efficient backend that no one sees running under a stodgy Desktop Environment, no one can show off to their friends.
Third , we need to know who is our direct competitor ( Zorin and POP OS) in the linux distro World and what do we offer that they don't; for now rediculous stability on low end hardware( they are terrible with that) ! Combine that , ( the strong quality) with something extra, like looks, eye candy and out of the box functionality ( better to wait until these are clearly sorted out rather than promote an unfinished product, we should have a target objective for a definitive release. i.e Elive 4 ,tied together with a definite E24 (or we look for another DE if Enlightenment cannot get its stability act together) We cannot sustain , updating new updates which break old updates and crash everything. ( E16 is too Old! Stable but old ...:.for emphasis..."and cumbersome unless maybe for geeks and yet all the geeks left in the world are already on board, so to get new members on board you need to appeal to their low superficial base desires, telling them about the benchmark specs of Elive means nothing to them....)