I do think with the current state of the games, we can agree that win rates are dropping slightly.
The only way to assess win rate in my opinion, is to do it every time you sit in a game, by surmising your RELATIVE EXPECTED WIN RATE. And it's far from an exact science (which is why i totally agree with what dgaf said about enjoying the ride). We do these calculations by observing other people's decision making and comparing it to our own, every single time we sit down to play. We constantly try to see who is making mistakes, who's making good decisions and bad, and who's being and doing the exploiting. It's arbitrary and the information you use is constantly shifting. Unfortunately, just like when you're trying to narrow someone's range on the turn and river after specific actions, when trying to determine your own win rate, you're constantly working with incomplete information for a number of reasons.
1. your ability to be honest with yourself about how well you're making decisions and how often you're really playing your A game VS your player pool is hurdle numero uno. It's very rare that I meet someone who is capable of doing this in the first place.
2. Player's skill levels and tilt levels are always changing. There may be 10 regs that you think (correctly) you have an arbitrary 30/40$ edge against when you're all playing your B+ games and running equal. Add two or three recreational players to your games constantly, and you have a nice win rate, hypothetically of course.
But what can happen, and often does, without people being truly aware of it is this: You start playing with 2.5 recreational players on average instead of 4 everyday. And the recreational players get a little bit better and start playing more snug. (We've all seen this over the past few years)
THEN, what also happens is that you can start to run under expectation for long periods of time, which causes you to play your B- game more than normal, because it's subtly affecting your decision making without you really being %100 conscious of it. And at the same time, some of the regs in your game are running really good, and the byproduct of that is that they're playing above the rim more than normal due to heightened confidence. So now you're win rate against the bad regs in barely there, and against the good regs you're actually playing at a disadvantage.
So, all the sudden your win rate has plummeted for 6-12 weeks, right under your nose, and you're not even aware of it. But then two years later, you're looking at your 5/10 results and trying to decide your win rate, and everything has changed! You're skill level, the player pool's skill level, the economy, game selection, the limits you're able to play due to that, and on and on
**** your results, we don't play enough hands live to even have a clue how variance is affecting us over the course of a few years. Try messing around with this variance simulator. It will blow your mind.
http://www.evplusplus.com/poker_tool...nce_simulator/
Once you can see the big picture more clearly, you start to realize how pointless this kind of discussion can really be. The best we can do is constantly define our edge in the best way we know how, play our A games as much as possible, play in the games where we honestly assess that we have the biggest edge, and let the results be whatever they are, because aside from the monetary value money has, the rest in pretty meaningless.