Alright, it seems like a rabbit hole so let's get down to it.
Back in the good ol' days of lower levels, max level being 15, there were a lot of different stuff. For example: the concept of magic mirror or luck glow didn't exist. Even if they did, the concepts were entirely different than what they are today. There wasn't any Kari rep, there wasn't any miuri tao, zurkhass, triad and whatnot. Hell, even after level 16 was introduced, some of these concepts were still not like how they are today.
Let's go point by point.
1) Monsters dodging and whatnot: As far as I can see, you have a dodger set, I'm not sure if you have a BC set but that might be one of the main reasons why your hunt sucks. Hunting with dodger set sucks. If you don't have, get a BC set and hunt with it, the difference is huge. However, you're right. I agree with you, they have tweaked a lot of stuff in the past couple of years. The most recent one is the shaissar droprate. Every time they introduce something new, it should mean one thing: they will screw something up. When they introduced improved shaissar deck, it was a warning that shaissar rate would be absolutely horrible, which it is, there were times that I used my doubled deck + diamond deck and got nothing for 2 months straight. I was keeping track like "haha 0 out of 13 go brrrr" and not just for me, but for others as well. They introduced the trinity amulets and rings, lo and behold, the droprate for shaissar will ring & amulets is screwed now.
2) As time passed, they introduced new stuff which further complicated sometimes for the sake of adding flavor to the game and sometimes for the sake of complicating the game. What do I mean by that? The mirror magic. The Luck Glow. The Chest Event. These events were different. The droprates? The items that dropped? A lot better. People who played luck glow used to get rubies, some people have enough rubies to get them going for at least 2 years with level 5 premium. Now you play it for mainly one thing: Might Charm. You don't have might charm = your hunts are going to be trash. You played mirror magic for what? To receive some good stuff, mostly chests but weren't allowed to open them during the event, just keep them piling up and buy some chests at chest event, open them all and get a lot of stuff. Now? You play it so you can get mirror fragments to get yourself the ocean amulet so that your full buff hunts are gonna be a lot better than before. Chests event? Well, it used to be old superprizes like cerrador and whatnot, nowadays people do it for merchant marks.
The game has changed a lot over the past 5 to 6 years, so many new stuff have been added to game, a lot of events have been changed, a lot of new events, items etc. have been added and they are not extras in any way, shape or form. They are a MUST. There isn't any news, any patch notes or whatsoever but it seems that with every single "maintenance" your account gets weaker or the mobs get stronger and you are more and more dependent on these new stuff.
An example: Before, you could get a lot of gold by hunting gargoyles as a low level or maurins and zarlogs as a high level, around 2017 (might be 2018 as well, I can't remember quite well) they changed the amount of money dropping from these monsters. Why? No idea. No reason given, no explanation, just said "you will get less money now" and then proceeded to increase the prices of stuff in fair. Not just that but also the extra 50g spending to receive the trade coupon became 100g for no reason. Again, why? No explanation. Here and there people say "it's to make the game the same as RU servers" because admin said so in one of the interviews. Again, why? No reason. Will there be a merge with RU? Will there be some sort of mutual event? Nope. No explanation.
These are the two major points and there a lot of minor points to talk about as well. But no need to keep going.
tl;dr
Game bad. They changes lots of things.
They reduced gold, made monster stronger.
They increased gold needed to spend in fairs to get extras.
They don't give explanation for anything.
For some reason game turns more and more into p2w but this time, you don't pay with real money, you pay with your time. You either play or you stay behind.