X-Factor: Flogging a Dead Horse?

It's very much a case of overkill, as you would expect with the mass media. Britain's 21st century love affair with TV talent competitions kicked into overdrive with 2001's Pop Idol, won by the now hugely successful (& deserving) Will Young. However the format faltered with only its second outing, replaced soon thereafter by Simon Cowell's X-Factor - a blatant ripoff of the same show. The British public was unexpectedly successfully hoodwinked into sticking with a show it had essentially already dropped; the result was Steve Brookstein. 

However it recovered and created genuine stars like Shayne Ward and Leona Lewis, but now? What to do with a show which has (as with Pop Idol) fulfilled its remit and once again no longer has an obvious, undiscovered star? Is the Great British public so stupid as to just keep lapping this boredom factor up ad infinitum?