It is true that overall players do tend to be more skilled than they were 5 years ago. This does not necessarily mean though that it's harder to make money as a professional. If you haven't really worked on your game over this time then yeah, they have moved up in skill, you haven't, then yeah you've fallen behind. However it's reasonable to assume that pros are going to be even more dedicated to improving their game than casual players so we would expect that given due dliigence by the pros that the gap should have widened.
The amount of good resources out there has increased trememdously over this time, and for a reasonable fee, Joe Blow can actually become a pretty decent player. However someone who plays for a living can still eat their lunch, or should be able to. It's actually quite healthy for the poker business to have all this happen, because it's obviously better to have the grapes in sight then out of sight and more players are playing more regularly now in the hopes of getting that little bet better that they envision to become profitable, and spending money on both training and their bankrolls.
I actually study what's being taught out there in order to better exploit it and I can tell you that it's very exploitable. The so called enlightened TAG gurus and their followers actually make some big mistakes, in spite of their successes, and I'd rather play against a player like this who is very predictable and will throw all kinds of money in the pot without the best of it, as opposed to a newbie who doesn't know what he/she is doing and is thus much more difficult to read.
Given the nature of poker, I can't ever see it getting to the point where the fish are no longer fish and folks like Dr. Al will pine for the glory days again. Dr. Al might, but it should always be a matter of the rich getting richer should they be sufficiently inspired.
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