I'm getting a bit off topic here, but the Dark Ages is a deeply interesting invention. It simultaneously allows for linear, teleological progression, from a dark pit of despair to the brilliant shining world of today; while also allowing for a Roman-ticized past that we can imagine ourselves as having fallen from.
But most people were probably better off in the "Dark Ages" than in Roman times. And perhaps the darkest period of European history isn't something buried a thousand or two thousand years ago but something that happened in living memory.
It's sort of nicely ambiguous. If you hate the period (some people do, the Renaissance guys obviously did), you can interpret it as "the time when people were in the dark (about stuff)". If you love it (I do, for a plethora of reasons, as do many contemporary historians, now that our reconstruction shows that the life of the people in that period was as rich and study-worthy as any other historical period), the obvious interpretation is "the the time we've been in the dark about for quite some time (i.e., due to scanty records)".
To me, it always seemed that in the provinces, quite little has changed after the end of the 5th century from the POV of your ordinary peasant. The more remote provinces have never been that much urbanized to begin with, and the non-Roman east of Europe didn't notice a thing anyway.
But most people were probably better off in the "Dark Ages" than in Roman times. And perhaps the darkest period of European history isn't something buried a thousand or two thousand years ago but something that happened in living memory.