I've been doing a lot of reading on the OCPoetry subreddit and I've noticed the trend of abandoning rhyme and structure.

This part of your post could probably be marked as [Meta]. I'm glad that OCPoetry is no longer part of this sub. This sub seems more useful without swathes of OC.

These poems tend not to have much rhyming scheme or metre. I understand when these things can be abandoned for a reason i.e showing meaninglessness, lack of structure or flow to life, but to me it seems that these people are just lazy.

Modernists also abandoned traditional structures and forms. Breaking from traditional values and creating new values is said to be a major part of the Modernist movement.

Whenever I'm discussing free verse, I always remember Robert Frost's statement that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. If we expand on this analogy, we see that old values have been deconstructed and recreated. We're still playing tennis, in Frost's analogy. It's still a scoring game but rules have changed.

Modernists often wrote poetry with the intent that it have a significant real world correlation and importance. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is a famous example of a modernist poetry that displays these qualities. The poem is written about real world events that affected the entire world. This might be contrasted against the themes of Romantic poetry that was often written to be a beautiful artefact in itself, like a song, art for art's sake.

Other modernists were influenced by the existential philosophy and many (like writers of Confessional poetry) prized the individual experience.

I understand these people aren't professionals, but the acclaim they are getting from their peers shows an admiration for this type of "poetry".

One must think about the scoring system, regarding each piece of poetry. What is the objective? What's the reasoning behind the form? What was the authors intent? Someone tried to score points by writing this poem - is this poem a success, within the context of its own unique scoring system.

Just like when someone sets out to write a Shakespearean sonnet. The form is objectively part of the scoring system for that type of poem. It must be 14 lines and it must rhyme. The author might choose to abandon the 14 line requirement, for some reason, with the intention of using another objective. Playing baseball with only 2 bases (also known as cricket).

Am I simply to set in my education of more classical romantics or is this the future of the poetic form?

I don't think so.

I love writing sonnets because I find the metre is relaxing. It helps me to focus and articulate my ideas, because I must work within restrictions, there's an economy imposed by the structure that dictates many aspects of my poem.