I've only looked at the Madeon map.
From the highest difficulty map, which I only glanced through a tiny bit, I see perfect spacing, stacks everywhere (for 1/2 tick notes), and nothing difficult (no jumps, special patterns, or whatever).
Spacing has completely changed; what it was before is not what it is today. Today spacing is so convoluted (I don't mean reading it is hard, but I mean how to describe how it works). You have all these seemingly random-ass jumps and random spacing changes, yet people can read perfectly fine the anti-spacing, the jumps, the streams, whatever that's in the map (if you look at it in the perspective of a person who hasn't really seen osu! before). A lot of this has to do with the approach rate, but many times even at AR 7 or lower people can intuitively understand spacing changes and things of that nature.
Just a few things about the map that I see, it probably is pretty opinionated but still:
- Stacks are really boring when used so much (as it seems like you do with the Madeon map),
- Perfect spacing throughout the map is boring (the map itself is also quite easy),
- This thing called "flow" really comes into play into these more so-called modern maps (i.e. instead of having 1/1 beat rests everywhere, you have long continuous 1/2 tick notes or 1/4 streams. Or in easier maps, instead of having 2/1 tick rests everywhere, have more fluidity with continuous 1/1 tick notes to fill the rests. Fluidity also comes when you don't stack notes all the time)
- Also, this might just be my opinion, but very visibly clear symmetry often time plays badly, like it flows badly and it just doesn't give a very fun feeling. JauiPlaY for example has a lot of symmetry sometimes in his maps, but it's not super visibly clear, but you can see and feel the symmetry (since the symmetry comes from longer patterns). He was kinda just the first thing that came to mind so I used him as an example. Otherwise, you could just not even use symmetry (for example if you look at most maps, you have sliders and circles going sideways and such, and no other notes to couple it on the other side of the horizontal or vertical axis)
The thing about old maps is that for the most part, they aren't badly mapped in that they are readable, but they just aren't that fun anymore. Back then, no one knew how to map like the current meta these days, and back then the old style was how people mapped, so that was supposedly fun and those were the best maps. but with the new current meta, people discovered readable, playable, and more entertaining ways to map (obviously this is subjective, but seriously, the amount of people who seriously prefer maps back in 2008 rather than the current maps today are extremely few). And when you say all maps ranked right now are complete shit, I want you rethink. Why are they complete shit, and what makes 2008 maps better than the ones now? And you can't just list a few good old maps. You need to generalize all, if not most, of the old maps and explain what makes them better than today's maps. I admit there are some good old maps, but I cannot say that for all maps or most maps back in the day. Same with today's maps, a lot of them aren't that fun and a lot are boring, but I still prefer them more than the majority of the old maps (though, not all of the them).
holy fuck this is longer than i thot