people are clouded by nostalgia if they think it's not much better than it used to be
overall the community was 50% great guys 50% starfishs and nothing in between, and there wasn't as much sucessful and large-scaled mod development as there has been recently
this, minus the modding community. its largely smaller than before.
during the v8 era it definitely felt like it was better overall since not everyone could host a server and thus those that did go up usually were by people who knew what they were doing. however the kinds of mods and the polish that went into them is a lot lower quality than current mods.
one example of a mod from this bygone era is the HMG, which has a pretty subpar bottomprint interface and no way of reloading the gun without firing all its bullets. but back then it was the biggest thing on this side of the game cause it actually had ammo.
reminder that crowns didnt exist until about 1.5-2 years ago, good falling tiles (ravencroft, theblackparrot) of any sort about the same timeframe and boss battles started 4 years ago. pictionary was made this year, superkarts about 1.5 years ago, and the best deathmatch gamemodes also within that timeframe.