Oh, I DEFINITELY miss those days. While the arguments were 'worse', they were definitely easier to handle, not to mention the constant flow of DOJO!! information every morning was enough to at least stem the ridiculous amounts of 'I can name this character from a series' or 'I like the power Kirby gets from this enemy' wishlists that are now flooding the current topic.
That's the problem with making a Smash thread in the middle of the near-decade break between Smash titles. There's nothing to discuss. There's dumb wishlists, random one-shots posting who they play, people who ask dumb questions(Will it be on the Wii? Will the WiiU and 3DS versions be the same?), and people who run in with every friend's friend's uncle rumor they can skillfully harvest from the vast knowledge that is a Gamestop employee's brain.
So yes, I easily preferred the old thread. Dumb arguments were 'better', but mostly, we had the DOJO!! to discuss instead of wishlists(and the game release, even though we all unanimously agreed that the DOJO!! was more fun than the game), and a much larger pillar of established(read; intelligent) members in order to conduct an actual conversation with. That's when the thread went downhill is when we all stopped ranting about online lag, SSE design, and Golden Hammer usage. That removed the bottleneck on wishlists and other comparable 'discussion' topics.