I'll concede that my dates were totally arbitrary, but I believe my overall point still stands. That point, btw, was more about the relative decline of First w/r/t Coach than about the absolute decline of either. As far as I'm concerned, domestic First is nowhere near what it used to be, and it's currently approximating the Coach experience of X years ago, where X is an imprecise but extant number.
Coach, as well, is certainly nothing like it used to be. It's been getting better in recent years, to your point, but only very slightly. I think it's still somewhere in the basin of an overall historic trough, though perhaps with upward direction.
(Full disclosure: as a very tall person, I feel changes in seating configuration, etc., a lot more accutely than most people do. So it's possible my opinions are either amplified by, or colored by, my individual perspective).
Efficiency has increased in coach -- tighter seat pitch, extra revenue charges for exit rows, etc., but for me, video-on-demand (or, portable video devices and in-ear-monitor headphones) makes up for a lot.
Pre-deregulation, they couldn't compete on price, so they competed on quality of perks (free food, service, etc.). Once they deregulated, they competed on price, but then started cost cutting on perks to make earnings. It was only after LCCs and the "premium experience LCCs" were successful that airlines both eliminated bundled perks and provided for-fee superior quality products for sale.
The "economy plus" type products for frequent fliers also go a long way to make economy tolerable for larger people.
I think air travel will continue to improve -- the biggest setback has been the 9/11 security increase, but other than that, the legacy carriers seem to be getting better.
I don't think you can use arbritrary (made up) information in describing the historical state of an event or situation. It's there in the books; either it happened or it did not. And my point is that both in the past and present, the upper levels of air travel as a whole have never declined to a point commensurate with the highest level of comfort and service achieved by lower class levels in the past forty years, which is my personal experience of flying. On a LCC or a short-hop/shuttle codeshare airline maybe there is little difference in classes, but in the legacy carriers even though the standards have adjusted downwards as society has changed it norms along with demand for said standards, there is a clear distinction between flying coach, business and first, from check-in to on-boarding, in the air and deplaning, the overall experience, across the industry, is different and it is still designed that way right from inception. And maybe that's one of the reasons that they've failed to make any real progress aside from surviving, since deregulation.
Coach, as well, is certainly nothing like it used to be. It's been getting better in recent years, to your point, but only very slightly. I think it's still somewhere in the basin of an overall historic trough, though perhaps with upward direction.
(Full disclosure: as a very tall person, I feel changes in seating configuration, etc., a lot more accutely than most people do. So it's possible my opinions are either amplified by, or colored by, my individual perspective).