DM Burnout.

[Remmirath]

Is it bad form to hand over the game to a surrogate DM?

I don't think so, no. Unless your players or the person you would be handing it over to object, of course.

Would a person even be willing to take over someone else's campaign? I would... and have, but that doesn't mean most people are chill with that kind of thing.

That depends. I've seen situations where a DM handed over their campaign for a session or two and was not quite happy with the results, but I'm sure that it could work well. I, personally, would probably not be willing to take over someone else's campaign any more than I would want to take over playing someone else's character or writing someone else's story - it would feel odd, and I wouldn't know where they were intending to go with it.

If it is bad form... then have any of you ever lost that spark as a DM?

Fairly frequently. I find it happens more often when I am too busy with other things. When I was very busy with college and directing a play at the same time, for instance, I didn't have much enthusiasm for the campaign I was DMing; it started to feel like one more thing I had to do that was eating into my very scarce time to do things on my own. Also, I didn't have enough time to plan things for it, so it started to bother me that the quality was slipping.

How did you rekindle it so you can get back to running the campaign your players deserve to play?

I usually take a week or two off. Particularly if part of the problem is that I've got behind on planning encounters and such things, because that gives me time to catch up on planning.

If you still want to be playing, but just not DMing, seeing if one of the other people in your group would like to run a short or one-shot campaign sounds like a good idea.