I think that you have missed the intent of this article. I wasn't lamenting technology, my old friend JC and I were right in the middle of the technological revolution that brought fly fishing back from the brink of extinction. It was JC and me that caught the bugs and placed them in those aquariums, we both worked with the folks at SA, we both taught fly casting, fly tying and experimented with different fly patterns based on the things we learned from photographing insects in the slant tank. However, both JC and I grew up hunting and fishing, and our knowledge and expertise grew out of those formative years. I lament the fact that many of the people I meet today did not come up that way, and I think it shows.
In addition, I don't lament the days when angling was the realm of the wealthy and privileged class. I was born on a dairy farm in upstate New York and its unlikely that my parents every earned more than a couple thousand dollars in a good year. I was hardly the product of the 'wealthy and privileged class', and my work with JC and SA were part of a concerted effort to make fly fishing available to everyone. However, and perhaps its only my opinion, but I've encountered a great deal of coarseness in the current crop of anglers. I live in one of the premier fresh water fly fishing areas in the country,and I've witnessed a change in the attitude in many of the anglers that I see on our local waters. I doubt that there were many individuals that were more passionate about the sport than Vince Marinaro, Ernest Schwiebert, Gary LaFontaine, or Jim Birkholm. They were, in a word, part of that world of 'the genteel - a world of ladies and gentlemen.