(Consider this a blanket disclaimer that my opinion of DashCon 2 is definitely somewhat biased, given that I worked on it. That said, this is more about my day-of experience than it is the convention itself, and it's all just my own opinion.)
DashCon 2 is the smallest convention I've ever attended.
(Well, that's not technically true; I've been to a couple of super-small free events that were really just a handful of vendor booths in a very small venue. But as far as actual paid-entry events go, DashCon 2 is the smallest convention I've ever attended.)
That might be in part because I mostly attend one convention a year (it's expensive!), and that one has usually been Anime North; which, while it isn't the largest local convention, still gets tens of thousands of people to attend every year.
I have, historically, considered it to be a comfortable size of convention. It's busy, sometimes crowded, but I've been going long enough that I know how to avoid the worst of it and have a broad-strokes plan of can't-miss events so I know where to be at what time.
That said, I've found myself feeling a bit more alienated as time goes on. I'm not sure how much of that is my mind making up reasons to stress, but it does feel harder to talk to people, and it also just doesn't feel as welcoming as it used to. It's not like the atmosphere is hostile, it's just harder for me to fit into it.
There's been a lot of talk over the last few years about the mainstreaming of fandom. I'm not going to get into my thoughts on that now, but these experiences often remind me of that conversation.
In a word, I am (and have always been) weird. When I say that there aren't many spaces left for weird freaks, I mostly mean myself, and anyone who feels like me.
I think it's important to acknowledge that being visibly neurodivergent for your entire life is often an inherently alienating experience. Physical disability, invisible or otherwise, can be too. Even if you're not, if you don't look a certain way, you often don't fit in.
(Sometimes even just when your interests happen to veer away from the mainstream. Cringe is dead, except when it isn't.)
There comes a point where you have to decide if you want to embrace that or not. For me, I don't know that it was even a choice: it's just how I've always been.
That said, it feels like I've seen less people like me at events in recent years. Maybe that's true, or maybe it's just that I haven't been looking in the right places. I really don't know.
It sometimes feels like being unapologetically weird and owning it has become an outlier, even and especially in the spaces that exist for the outliers. (Historically, people who get excited about anime, and anime conventions especially, have not been considered cool, at least in a traditional sense.)
What I do know is that DashCon 2 was one of the exceptions to all of that.
It gave me something that I hadn't even realized I was missing: the feeling of community, of feeling seen and understood. Whether by the people who actually attended the panel I ran (even though it was so early in the day!), everyone who enthused over my silly ball pit keychains at the Crow Exchange, or just finally getting to see friends in person (either for the first time, or the first time in a while).
Never in my life have I seen so many people so unapologetically passionate about the things they love. That, to me, is the spirit of what DashCon should have always been: it was just slightly before my time, but it's one of the greatest honors I can imagine to have been a part of its redemption.