jamyskis: This forum has never really been "classy" in any sense of the word.

I suspect what you miss is the fact that (a) the community was much smaller before GOG introduced indies and modern titles, and was also much more manageable and (b) the community on the whole was a fair bit older (age was a prerequisite for the majority to appreciate the games that were here - younger fans of DOS games are rarer on the whole) until indie games and modern games arrived, which in turn has attracted a younger audience, a sizeable chunk of which makes its immaturity plainly obvious.

Also, as the problems of DRM manifest themselves in different ways to different people, DRM-free has become a much more mass-market force than before and is no longer simply a niche phenomenon limited to those with an understanding of the technical and practical problems of DRM. Whereas before this forum was largely made up of people who understood the problems of DRM and simply didn't want to be burned by these problems, now we have a lot of people who have actually been burned by the likes of Steam, UPlay and Origin and have only come here in the light of those experiences.

And the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia do help to expunge the memory of idiots like Roman5 with his procrastination and misogyny, GameRager with his extremely unpleasant elitism, and SimonG, who would quite regularly point out how Steam users were supposedly intellectually superior because he preferred Steam and because of his implied vocation in the legal industry (while frequently falling short of ever calling himself a lawyer).