I don't think we tend to forget that. Everyone can look at hallmarks in MMO development to look at how cannibalistic the industry is. UO took the world by storm and we saw almost nothing but isometric diablo/UO knockoffs for five straight years. WoW did the same tenfold and we saw nothing but WoW knockoffs for ten straight years. If any innovative idea is shown in the hundreds of knockoffs produced, it's usually stolen by the top dog to continue it's life. And we all learned that loads of ambition in a direction that doesn't cater to the masses can backfire when Tabula Rasa bombed harder than any MMO that has hit the market since.

What we DO tend to forget is that the Internet community, the MMO community, the market and (the gaming) industry have all gotten exponentially bigger. This creates more competition, higher turnover and worst of all, promotes mob mentality often through commercial media (publications) or social media (reddit). Nowadays, one slip up from a single, insignificant community manager can destroy your public image. One persuasively headlined blog on a subreddit crying about imbalance or some shitty customer service will destroy you. The old days of EQ developers sitting on the forums, telling a complaining customer, "Shut up and give me my ten bucks per month, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades.", replaced by picture-perfect politically correct caricatures of human beings that bring no emotion to their craft or their public conversations about it.

This is why you can go back to all the shitty WoW 1.0 private servers for the rest of your life and it'll never be the same as it was in 2004. The culture was different, the people were different and the market was different. It'll never be the same. The golden age of gaming is long over. Where people used to have intelligent discussions is now replaced by a perpetual life long competition of who can act more retarded or pseudo clever or reference the most pop culture while trying to be funny. Those who aren't committing to that particulair generalization are busy "baiting"/"trolling" people, saying things that lack moral or social compass purposely for the sake of inciting uproar.

As a teenager, I used to think that people saying things got shittier as they got more popular were a bunch of old, jaded retro farts that will never like anything in their heyday. Yet the last 15 years of Internet and gaming popularity explosion seems to prove the fact that anything that gets more popularity gets shittier in parallel.