I agree with you: The priesthood will continue to decline, mainly due to demographic factors.
Back in the day-—I’m sure many of us recall-—it was the norm for Catholic families to have a large number of children. Not unusual for a Catholic family to have five or six or in some cases seven or eight children. These families-—especially the most religious and observant-—often encouraged a son or a daughter to enter into vocations. Nowdays, most Catholic families have about the same number of children as most Protestant families-—usually one or two. So now days these families usually don’t encourage their children to enter into the celibate vocations.
Here, in the L.A. Archdiocese-—where I live-—we have large immigrant communities which still produce large families. Consequently most of the new seminarians and priests entering into vocations now come from those communities. The priesthood here used to be of mostly Irish and Italian descent. Now most of the new priests I see coming into the fold around here are of hispanic and Asian descent. Also, I’ve noticed many of the men today entering are considerably older than was once the case. Men who are more sexually mature-—many have been around the block a few times-—and know what is expected of them. Since the pedophile priest scandal, the Archdiocese has gone to great lengths to weed out potential pedophiles.
Today, few Catholic parents would want one or both of their 2.0 planned kids to take vows of celibacy.
Contraception is also what is killing marriage --- across the board, for people of all religions. It is killing the marriage culture: families, cities, nations and civilizations. But contraception killed Holy Orders first.