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The power ballad destroyed metal? That's news to me. Last time I checked, I could still find Poison, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, and all those other great bands from the 80s on my radio. Some of these groups even do the occasional tour. They may be playing smaller venues and not the sold out arenas (I'm reminded of the scene from Spinal Tap), but they are still around, and they are still rockin'. Didn't Poison just come out with a new album? To say that something is destroyed suggests that it no longer exists, and that is simply not the case with metal.

What happened with metal is what has happened with every other genre. It reached its peak in popularity and then simply declined. Ballads, in this fans personal opinion, had nothing to do with metal being destroyed, or even decreasing in popularity. On the contrary, ballads were more like a last ditch effort to maintain a bands popularity and record sales.
People don't always want to hear, and bands certainly don't always want to admit, that the market has an enormous amount of influence on what type of music a band produces. A band can stick to its roots as much as it wants, but if it wants to sell records, its got to also give the people what they want. Ballads are what the people wanted. To quote Metallica, "Sad but true."
Ballads reached a wider audience. More people could relate to a relatively mellow and heartfelt ballad than they could a heart pounding, adrenaline fueled metal piece. Hardcore metal fans may have seen the shift toward ballads as a betrayal, but for a band needing to sell records and maintain a wider popularity, it was necessary. Unfortunately, the ballads soon began to dip in popularity as well (probably because it became the cliche thing to do and every metal group began to "unplugged" for a song or two), and because many metal fans had been disillusioned by the ballads, the metal groups didn't have their corps fan base to really fall back on. Thus, metal faded to the background.
Don't blame the ballad, however. It wasn't the ballad's fault, or even a band's fault for producing a ballad that led to metal's decline. More than anything it was the fickle marketplace and listening audience that shrugged off metal for the new generation of popular music. That's how music is. One genre fades away to make room for the next, and each new generation adds to the growing history and variety of Rock and Roll. Genres don't die. They just step out of the spotlight. It happened with disco, it happened with metal, and God willing, it will happen with Brittany Spears and her ilk soon enough. However, we only have to search the radio and hear Mr. Snider scream, "I wanna Rock," to know that metal was not destroyed.

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