All in all it looks like a case of the Southeast Asian “theatre state”. Image belies the reality. The royalists’ sound and fury signifies maybe not nothing, but that they are much weaker than they (and we) think they are...
To put it in old Marxist terms, the royalists still have an ideological hegemony, but real power is with the Thaksin camp, whose access to key ideological resources in Thailand is more limited, hence the skewed picture of reality.
So my view is that it’s getting closer to “game over” for the Democrats, and more broadly their royalist supporters.
But this certainly does not mean that there is not a strong possibility of violence, due to the miscalculation of the relative strengths of the two sides.