I think the problem most old-school Epcot fans have is that they're understandably stuck on the ride's OLD storyline, and have difficulty seeing the newer, diffferent story. (I think a first-time rider would look at the new SSE in a much different way than we do)
The new ride's theme is summed up in the first line: "Where are we going? And how did we get there?"
Instead of a look at communication history, the new SSE story tries to show modern riders how we arrived at the technology we've got today.
The narrator is speaking to us passengers in 2008, demonstrating how our laptops, iPods, and cellphones were born (and how those stepping stones will lead to future advancements).
As we're traveling through the "historical" periods, the narrator must frequently remind us that the scenes we're looking at (ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, etc) have relevance to our modern lives. THIS IS HOW SSE DIFFERS FROM THE OLD VERSION. The narrator uses 2008 references to hit home just how important those primitive advancements ultimately were to modern man.
Papyrus is foreign to us now, but that invention led to "record-keeping and unfortunately, taxes"...which IS part of our daily lives. She could have also said papyrus "led to inkjet printers that allow us to reproduce photographs of ourselves and loved ones." The narrator is not making a "joke" about taxes. She's drawing a line between ancient Egypt and 2008.
Likewise, the Romans accelerated the sharing of information between people far from each other---just like the "world wide web" does today. It's not a joke. It's another example of how we got to our current technology.
Same with the "back-up" libraries in the Middle East. Back then, handwritten books were duplicated and stored in a separate location, so when the originals were destroyed, we still had copies. That same ancient concept is at the heart of today's "hard drive" technology.
As for that line "Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC's?" With today's global technology, we may not all speak the same language, but most of those languages are made up of the same building blocks: A-B-C-D-E-etc. The computer keyboard I'm using right now would not have been possible without the Phoenicians.
As Imagineer Marc Davis stated, in theme park rides like PotC, riders need to understand the point of the scene as quickly as possible. On SSE, in just nine short words, the narrator explains why three bearded men on boats holding scrolls have relevance to my modern-day life.
As I said earlier, for us who are familiar with looking at these animatronics and sets, the new narration is starkly different. But it's SUPPOSED to be, because it's telling a new story.
In a nutshell, the Jeremy Irons story was "Cave paintings led to papyrus, which led to scrolls, which led to theater scripts and the arts, which led to a giant distribution system, which led to sharing the same ideas in distant lands, which led to books, then to an a primitive printing press, then to an industrial printing press, then the telegraph, telephone, movies, TV, and the internet."
The Judy Dench story is : "Cave paintings were a good start, but they would not have been compatible with our modern mobile lifestyle. Papyrus led to modern record-keeping. The Phonecians helped us all vaguely speak the same language today. The Greek's mathematics led to modern engineering and computer technology. The Romans began the process of disseminating information across great distances, which we've improved on with the internet. Middle Easterners first saw the value of backing up data, as we do today. The printing press and books helped spread information quickly, just as we're still striving to do. After the Industrial Revolution, technology advanced quickly, from telegraph to space travel to home computers and beyond."
I gotta say, I think the new SSE story is actually much deeper, complex, relevant, and better told than any previous version. It's even more amazing when you consider the Imagineers had to develop that new story around existing ride elements.
Since they couldn't rebuild SSE from scratch, their hands were often tied, but they still pulled off a new storyline.
The only thing that would make the attraction tell an even better story would be to somehow incorporate a cave painting at the very end of the ride, either along the walls or in the touchscreen video, to bring the journey full-circle and dramatically show just how far we've advanced technology.
