The thing is that people tend to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, often focusing on good memories and blocking the negative ones and same thing happens on this forum. I haven't been here long enough that I can talk about "good ol' times" but I've been on some other forums for ~20 years and I am definitely guilty of that when I look at the past. Then again, it makes sense to remember good stuff from the past better as we were younger, and on top of that its a kind of defense mechanism since dwelling on bad stuff ain't healthy at all.
I'm not entirely sure when the good ol' days started, and ended or if they ever existed at all. One thing for sure is, we've lost a lot of good users throughout the years. However, I don't necessarily believe that's because the forum got worse, but like I suggested before older users are more prone to getting annoyed at issues which have been constant, and because we don't tend to dwell on the past (I mean these years, especially political issues people seem to have memories like goldfish, but that's another matter
) we do tend to forget about the bad, and only remember the good. That's what nostalgia does, ever go watch a movie or play a game you loved as a child? Then, when you come to play it you realise how bloody bad it is. This is usually because of passion, which creates the rose tinted glasses outlook you mentioned. I don't doubt there's a lot of passion around this forum, it's quite obvious with the amount of time users have dedicated over the years, whether that's posting, reporting, or handling trust issues, we've got a lot of users that are dedicated here.
I haven't always liked certain rules as an example, however with time I think I've come to the realisation they're implemented the way they are, because if you didn't it would open up a can of worms. For example, not moderating scams, in my early years I just couldn't get my head around it, now I can understand why. Also, I think over the years I've become a little more aware of censorship issues, and how Bitcointalk is largely a safe haven from it compared to other forums.
I kinda disagree with that. Situation was maybe like that ~2 years ago (I remember very good members fighting to get into lowest paid Bitcoin signature campaigns) due low amount of sig campaigns but situation now is completely different and it's a sellers market. There are way more spots in Bitcoin signature campaigns than there are decent members interested, resulting in managers lowering the bar as they have fill up the campaign.
I think the biggest offender recently of low quality signature campaign posters was recently halted, and there was a whole debacle over in Reputation over users not getting paid. That by far had the most spammers out of the Bitcoin paying campaigns. Since then, I generally think we're in a good place, if we aren't maybe us moderators need to be made aware of that by reporting them, as long as they're breaking forum rules of course, but generally signature spammers are.
There's always probably going to be examples, however that's why I used the word rarely. I don't think the Bitcoin paying signature campaigns, currently have widespread issues. However, if we start talking about bounties, and altcoin paying signature campaigns, that's when the problems really start to fire up. I do think something needs to be done for the latter, I just don't know what would be the best thing to implement for that, so as we stand I don't really have any suggestions.