A lot of it is that your standards are driven by stories of past excellence and people leave out the nonsense of years past when telling stories.

My grandfather worked for GM in its heyday. He had stories of shuffling desks to make a VP happy, playing accounting games, project costs exploding, contractors being lazy and screwing things up (one brought a typical ladder to wire a warehouse that was 70 feet high), meetings over the placement of newspaper boxes, etc.

My company loves to talk about being agile. They leave out a bureaucracy on par with the government (and I worked in the government before coming here) when it comes to resource management.

I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society. It is just a lot of lurching and stumbling in a general direction.