2012 was the year of "SAML is dead. Long live SAML!". We may finally see that obituary due to an existential threat. In the last decade, SAML has remained in widespread production use in many sectors and has even seen growth in some. The OASIS technical committee was retired in July 2023, and it's assumed there will be no further changes to the standards. I've spent much of my career in the world of R&E multilateral federation, where we inter-federate ~80 national federations consisting of >10,000 IdPs and SPs and millions of users. In the R&E space, we have continued to extend our practices with such things as entity categories, MFA, levels of assurance, and many other agreed-upon practices. In 2022, I worked in sectors that have SAML scaling needs well beyond R&E multilateral federations. I will discuss the state of SAML federation practices in various sectors, some strengths and shortcomings of SAML as practiced in these sectors today, why SAML is still seen as "hard", and I will discuss some looming changes in the industry which may be an existential threat to the leading federation protocols in use today (SAML and OIDC). Finally, I will point out ways to get involved in the community that has a voice in these looming changes.