Er... Franziska Preuss is waaaay better than Denise Herrmann this year and over half a decade younger. She also continued to train with her regional trainer in Ruhpolding (who used to run the national team during the Dahlmeier years) whereas everybody else went into the national groups, and her skiing is better this year whereas everybody else is lacking in speed a bit, a bit like in Russia when they made Konovalov the women's coach and he focused everything on shooting to the end result of having no competitive skiers at all in the World Cup team and overtraining them.
To be fair, the German women had a bit of a drought after Neuner retired, but they rebuilt around the new team from the Junior Worlds with Dahlmeier at the centre, Preuss and Hinz. Hettich looks useful, and they are still getting results in the junior worlds, but seem short on the super-talents that have kept them at the top. The men are still concerningly reliant on the 30-somethings, but this was also a problem they had 8-9 years ago when an ageing Greis and a late career renaissance for Birnbacher were their best performers. Doll is still young enough to be around a while yet, their biggest prospect at the lower levels would appear to be Danilo Riethmüller, but the big problem is they don't appear to be keeping speed. Ski speed has been lacking for a few seasons now among the men, and of those on the fringe of the team who might be expected to still be there when Peiffer and Lesser are gone - Rees, Horn, Nawrath, Fratzscher etc. - only possibly Horn is at a level competitive with the best for ski speed. Kühn looks worryingly slow for the moment. It seems to me there's still some pretty strong and lengty startlists in the national competitions (and of course taking this year when there's been no Deutschlandpokal, IBU Cup or Alpencup to assess anybody outside of the World Cup, as a judging point has its weaknesses) but there doesn't seem to be either the ski tech or the coaching to maximise that talent at the World Cup level.
They're in a similar position to Russia of having all of the support cast but not the stars, but nothing like as drastic because their coaches are prepared to give a chance to youth, just not the best at knowing what to do with it.
I think France benefit from a more centralised sport, while they don't have large parts of the country specialised for it, the sport is less siloed into regional hotspots than the German system. The other big problem for Germany is that a few disappointing winters also wipes out a few of their venues which are at lowish altitude, like Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Winterberg and Altenberg (while Oberhof will gladly sacrifice a DP/AlpenCup weekend to keep the World Cup possible if there is a lack of snow) whereas the French venues are largely at high enough altitude to be OK because the Pyrenean venues are at Font-Romeu and Plateau de Beille, and the Alpine/Jurassien ones are largely at places like Méribel, Bessans and Les Saisies which are up at 1300m+ and often tied to Alpine venues so snow supply is better.
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