I agree with everything the OP said about latter-day Barker TPIR, along with a few others:
* Bob having increasing numbers of senior moments, and coming off as increasingly testy. He also seemed to phone it in a lot of the time (e.g., the constant "historical moment" non-joke).
* Rod sounding bored and lifeless, which seemed to have started ca. 1990 (to be fair, I do remember a few episodes in 2002 where he sounded like he did in the 80s).
* That fugly Hollywood mural set clashed so badly, and the purple/blue/pink was hardly any better.
And finally, there's the loss of the "family" feel the show had when Bob stopped chatting with the models, and moreso when Rod stopped appearing on-camera. IMO, that last semblance of the "family" feel went when Rod died. Since Rich never appeared on-camera in the Barker era, I never felt that he really fit in due to his lack of interaction. At least that was taken care of in the Drew era, but by then, Rich was so freaking loud and shrill that it was hard to sit through a full episode.
Also, other shows:
* WWTBaM? when it moved to syndie with Meredith, simply because I don't like her hosting style (for reasons I've stated previously).
* DoND when the novelty just wore off. It's entirely spectacle to dress up a "game" so flimsy it makes Newlywed Game look like a Jay Wolpert creation.
* 1 vs. 100 when they decided to change the money ladder and rules on every freaking episode.
* Feud when Karn obviously stopped trying. I was surprised to watch some middle-era Karn episodes and actually see him get in a decent ad-lib, but after a while, he somehow thought that repeating the answer four or five times while laughing awkwardly constituted a joke. And I barely watched the O'Hurley era since by then I'd just lost interest in the Feud as a whole. (But having seen a few O'Hurley episodes on YouTube, I think he was a little too slick.)
* J! sometime in the sushi bar era. Alex just seemed so much more cold and impersonal than I remembered from my childhood (granted, I watched some early-90s episodes, and he seemed stiff and distant then, too). He did seem to relax a little once the sushi bar set disappeared, and I really began to notice it when Ken's run started. (In fact, I'm pretty sure Ken was what got me back into becoming a regular J! watcher.)
And on the flipside, count me in as someone who likes modern-day Wheel as it is. When it's just puzzles, and there's nothing more exciting than the prize wedge, it can get a tad repetitive. Particularly if, as was quite often the case until around 2000, Round 1 was an extremely short puzzle with few common letters (and sometimes the last round too — I actually saw one game where the last round was PAYDAY, and there were so many wrong letters that they actually edited out a few turns before it finally went to Speed-Up).
