NES-era games juiced the difficulty so you couldn't beat them on rental. Not quite the same but if I were going to pick a "golden age" of relatively not-exploitative gaming it might go from SNES-PS2 or so.
It's really incredible when you see printed out maps of old NES games just how small the levels were. You could put an entire game in a 4 or 5 page spread in Nintendo Power if you wanted.
There are some exceptions to the rule of course, but it usually holds that the later localizations get the more polished product.
Rock Man 2 (Mega Man 2 in North America) had one only difficulty in the Japanese release. In North America, Mega Man 2 offered a "Difficult" option, which was the original Japanese difficulty. "Normal" was the default difficulty for the North America release toned things down quite a bit, as Capcom felt the game would be considered too difficult by the North American market.
There's well documented lists of games that were significantly easier for the North American release, with only a few harder for North America.
I think a lot of the indie and AA space is still very good, though.