Disney has never really been "as close to perfection as realistically possible." I can remember trips in the late 1970s where we had bad CS food, had to stand in line forever for popular rides (with no FP available), encountered indifferent CMs, and saw > gasp! < painters at work on Main Street. However, because "the good old days" are always better than the "now", the bad moments kind of fade into the collective fuzziness of the memory. (Because back in the 70s, digital cameras didn't exist, nor did the Internet, and so people didn't exhaustively document every bit of chipped paint or burned-out lightbulb and share that information in chat rooms, so that everyone else can go visit WDW and specifically look for stuff that's wrong so that they can come back and be indignant too.)
Disney has, at some level, always sacrificed it's standards for profits. Look at all the really bad movies that came out during the Card Walker years when everything was one big formula, and the catchphrase was "put the Disney name on it and people will buy it." But again ... no Facebook pages or DIS boards to discuss things on. If people were indignant, they just kind of kept it to themselves. And then Little Mermaid came along and fixed the problem.
I don't think that the company has changed near as much as the reporting system has changed. Someone sees a bit of backstage construction and so they report on how horrible it is to see that, causing more and more people to go and look at it when otherwise they'd have never noticed. Someone gets to wake up Tinkerbell and they talk about it and then other people get mad because they didn't get to wake up Tinkerbell on their trips and that's then somehow Disney's fault.
I think if people looked at Disney history without the benefit of nostalgia, they'd see that Disney has always been a very "human" place. Even the opening day of
Disneyland was fraught with problems, including not enough food, asphalt that literally melted under peoples' feet, and shows that were under-rehearsed disasters. But no one remembers that part. Just like ten years from now, no one is going to remember that moment on the train when they saw Mickey's house being demo'd or the time they met a grumpy CM. And if they DO remember it, it will be as kind of a funny anecdote about their trip "back in 2010".