What styles work better and what do to a lesser degree or don't has been established for a while.

*waiting for inevitable rehepapp comment*

I'm tempted

Absolutely. The bar in general has been raised MASSIVELY from q3's days to now. Pros today must be extremely good at everything, and the aiming especially has reached absurd levels.

In general, you can do many less mistakes.

the level of play at the pro level has been in decline for a couple of years now coressponding with the absence of big tourneys. i think the peak was something like 6 years ago when we had IEM.. relatively lots of money, most importantly; sponsotrs paying for players to travel.. that gave incentive to lots of players, so they all prepared a lot more then they do today...
just look at qcon this year, only rapha evil and spartie capable of real high level play like we used to see.. zero4 is good of course but without lots of practice to obtain and maintain good form alltimes bound for 5-8th.
fraze can upset a tourney no more, the thing that makes him win also makes him loose.. coller would say to him " you have to know when to play rulet and when to not play rulet"

Evil brought the game to a new level. Rapha and cypher had to catch up.
Mostly though, because of the netcode compared to OSP.

nah, the last couple of years when evil is at the top everyone else stopped playing simple as that.

Dude cypher quit the game cos he couldn't take the rape anymore

great insight

I haven't dueled for a long time and recently watched some ztn, and I feel that the starting spawns are played a bit differently. People are more comfortable going straight to armour or vice versa straight to weapons like rail.

Could be all in my head though :)