Its not even so much one's understanding that fades. Sometimes the times change and what people value or focus on becomes different. Someone that was at the top of their game in 2007 can come back to the site today with the same level of understanding, not missing a beat, and their style wouldn't quite mesh with today's audience. With voting, I've seen different trends. There was a time when it was all about complexity and people were willing to forgive choppy wording as long as the metaphor/wordplay hit. Then it became all about clean wording and readability and a pun-heavy verse with choppy wording could easily lose to a more simplistic verse with clean straightforward readbility. These days, from what I can see, people seem to dock more points for broken multis than they used to. The emphasis is ever changing with the voting consensus. Same as with battling. I can almost guarantee that a lot of people that are considered dope battlers here would not be rated so highly on other sites because they prefer different styles. Long-bar/short-bar, level of humor or disrespect vs complexity, etc.
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