What I miss most (and am trying to find elsewhere, not in audio but in pretty much every area) is that when Google wasn't as just creepily good as it is now, it was a lot harder to find reviews to crib off so there was a point in the early Y2K's where you could be reasonably guaranteed that whomever you were discussing, arguing or flaming with owned whatever we were talking about and wasn't often basing their opinions on someone else's.
Now it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, opinion-wise. You can do the research in terms of how people's relative opinions drastically change between what they actually have and pretend to have when they appropriated their opinion from someone else who doesn't share a common viewpoint, but often doing the work is just too hard. And even in terms of professional reviews, add that to the mid-2000's disempowerment of those employed by the bigger publications who were actually journalists as opposed to grafting bloggers, and it's just usually become a game of who does viral marketing best, who's then further assisted by the amplification effect of forums. I doubt you'll have any of the active trade participants who were the biggest recipient of this gift complaining now.
On the other hand, back then there was a lot less in terms of objectivity because the equipment to enable this wasn't within the reach of most, so while everyone may have had what they were talking about, it was certainly the case that discussion often came down to a battle of egos.
On the other other hand, now while a lot of people can measure even if they don't have the level of stuff that I used to have until recently (and the guy who apparently has been banished for ever / Hertsens have), most don't appear to know how to control, and the majority of the people reading don't know how to interpret the figures beyond whatever perception skew the author might have placed on it... The Infographic Problem, making subjectivity seem like objectivity which in many ways is worse because you have something you can point at and say "See? This is true because I have figures'.
[...old guy grumbling continues]