Well, maybe it's a bit of the truism that you don't know what you had until it's gone.
While I was not in the parks at the time, online I saw nothing but people complaining about how dated and busted they perceived OG Star Tours to be. People were tripping over themselves to wish for a new Star Tours online.
As a non-SW fan, I can't speak from personal experience past 1998 in the states regarding 1.0, but I
did get to ride it one last time in Paris in 2015-and to me it felt clunky and dated. It leads me to strongly suspect that if you put the OG version and the current version side by side, most guests would prefer the current version. Perhaps your ridethroughs are different, but when I ride Star Tours it seems like everyone gets off having had a great time and people still get a kick out of the rebel spy bit and laugh at the jokes. The wait was a bit shorter this time around for Star Tours than my previous visits, but I think that's less because people feel ST 2.0 is inferior and more likely attributable to Galaxy's Edge now also existing in the same park, and both rides in that land have moments where they basically also become Star Tours, so the former Tomorrowland stalwart now feels somewhat redundant. YMMV.
@Californian Elitist is 100% correct regarding objectivity and subjectivity, and as others have also alluded to in this thread, every generation will perceive things differently than the generation before it. We love and take for granted Big Thunder, seeing it is as a key part of Disneyland; for others, Big Thunder ruined Disneyland because it took the place of
their Mine Train. Sure, some things are universal, but time, changing tastes, and other factors tend to change the way things are seen in unexpected ways. There's likely some truth to the notion that it will be harder for the park to build new lifelong fans due to price increases alone (which is probably the actual deterrent to most people becoming big fans rather than the use of IP), but there are also plenty of people who don't seem to mind the changes that frustrate so many of us. The parks will continue to change in ways that may not resonate with us but will resonate with others, and that's more unavoidable than many of us would like to admit.