I think you're looking at a pretty narrow genre (Complex Games) and extrapolating the entire platform's content/potential from it. There are fewer people making as complex games as back then, but saying people are uneducated is a bit silly.
I'm not saying people are uneducated, I'm saying most games are made nowadays for the mainstream and I don't think you can argue gamers back in the mid-80s were more likely to be more of the college types of folks who happened to be early adopters in the days. Nowadays even 10 years old play on PC and that completely skews what games you make for that market.
While his example of the flight sim might be an extreme, I'd agree that many genres have been oversimplified. One incredibly disappointing example that comes to mind is the X-Com series.
