In my mind, the meetings are what make it appealing, though after a while I started to see they were all about the same thing: drinking with instant friends. Almost every event has alcohol involved as well as "instant friends", seemingly good people with whom I could be friendly but never really connect. As a foreigner living in a large city, I could never be as interesting as a foreigner who was just visiting, even though I personally only found myself enjoying (to a certain extent) the local CSers because at least I could try to build an on-going friendship with them.
The seedy underbelly of CS is that it's a hook-up enabler. Many local CSers have had sexual relations with other local CSers as well as with the foreign CSers. The idea of "if it happens, it happens" is fine with me but I found that the main draw for the locals in several large foreign cities was finding a hook-up. In fact, I'll admit that my girlfriend is someone I met on CS (though we maintained a couple-year friendship before meeting). Now that we live in the same city, sometimes we have contact with the same CSers and in few instances we both get messaged by the same user. In one case, a male user who I met at a local meeting sent me a very brief, basic email saying we should hang out some time. My gf, who he hadn't met, got a message from him that was longer, funnier, and which specifically asked about going out on a certain date, and where he left his cell number at the bottom.
For this reasons above, the "instant friend" CSers (even the most "hardcore" or well-known of them) never became real friends, despite my attempts to make friendships. Also, any CS event had to be an "event" for anyone to really care, meaning it had to be sizable. In my new city, in a new country, the local group is chock-full of "let's go out tonight (drink & party)" posts. No substance, no spirit.