Touhou's move away from wikia was the major catalyst. I tried to be active on the new wiki, but just like what happened to me at VGMdb, my duties were quickly scooped up and done better and faster by someone relatively new. With no incentive for wanting to find the new things, the interest just died out.
The reason I like anime over manga is that it's easier to find in High Quality and new releases are frequent. With manga, it's the same old stories that everyone's already read before or small, unexciting updates. With anime, there's always new content every week that will be translated quickly and a lot more tends to get done (which is why most anime are 12-13 eps). The slower pace (along with voices and music and such) tends to make characters more attachable in my view. I got nothing on the climax though.
The only eroge I've played and enjoyed are untranslated. And this is where watching anime comes in handy. With all the anime I've watched, I've picked up a lot of weeaboo jap. While I may not understand what's going on fully, I still have a general idea. Also, I've learned some written Japanese as well because I associate what the characters say to what's on the screen (one day I will be able to understand you, generic harem protagonist). I tend to stick to rom coms eroge. Because even if I don't understand what's going on, the exaggerated expressions and reactions of the characters are funny in and of themselves. And TWOGK is awesome. I want to read the manga eventually, but anime backlog is priority.
Find some common ground. If you're intelligent, then schoolwork will always be a common ground. I have a bunch of idiots as one of my groups of friends, but in actuality, they're among the top of the class (otherwise, they wouldn't be in the same class as me). Funny stories about what happened in class before, the news, and other such things. Even if I can't join in on the conversation, I'll just listen politely, maybe make a jab when appropriate, as well as laugh when appropriate. I view conversation as something that has to be fun, enjoyable, or at the very least something that just happens. Forcing a conversation almost always never works out too well.
Good luck. From what I've seen, it's just the same crowd of people as before. There hasn't been a surge of good members in OT since 2009 and all the good people from before are gone or banned. Quite a shame. JOIN MYANIMELIST.