braineclipse
Steve Sedgley
The thing with dead ball situations is that they usually ( for various reasons) do not work out most of the time. Time has not changed this but the perspective of fans probably has. For example take Goldenballs and his free kicks outside the box, now if you listen to the so called experts ( pundits and the like) he was ace and the best around, but if you check out his success rate it was no better then most % wise.
Fans today ( for some unknown reason) think if they do not work all the time then they must be brick.
I think you're spot on. I also think tv-highlights influences perception on this quite a lot. Every week, sometimes many times a week, we're exposed to some team somewhere scoring a set piece goal. Whereas every week we watch us not score from the vast majority (or all) of our set pieces. "Why can't we just do like X" where X changes every week to whatever player or team just succeeded becomes the thinking and disappointment sets in.
Of course back in the day when you were young and football highlights were delivered by steam train and the pony express that wasn't a problem