If I could chime in here and give my tuppence worth...
I started back in Nov 2010. There were only WGT balls available, the best ball not only being level-specific, but also tier-specific, i.e. only for Legends because they needed a little bit of extra control as they were now hitting from car park tees. But even then the ball wasn't stopping on a sixpence (or a dime if you prefer) , nor was the meter so slow that you could go make a cup of tea and still come back to hit the ding. And as you bought clubs to get more distance you sacrificed that distance for meter speed, i.e. the meter was faster. It took skill and practice to be a good player
The game was fun, and far more realistic than it is now or ever will be again. And I would argue (and I'm a real low-handicap golfer) it was far more fun back then than it is now. You had to learn how to play shots, you had to have good reactions, you had to learn how far the ball would run on the greens; yes you might still have used calculators and spreadsheets, but there was still far more thought that went into playing shots than one does now. For example, I remember being taught how to play the approach shot on St Andrews #2, left pin. If you aimed at the pin the ball would invariably run way past, there was simply no way of stopping it. And that's what you should expect when it's on a downhill slope. However, to the left of the pin is a little hump; you aimed for that hump to slow the ball down, and sometimes it might even stop. The putt was still difficult, but much shorter. Then they brought in Callaway balls and Callaway wedges and before you knew it you were landing just past the pin and screwing the ball back up the slope and off the front of the green - I very much doubt you'd ever see that in real golf on that approach shot.
I remember my first ever full 18-fole game on Bethpage Black... +17. That was with starter clubs and balls. Fun? Definitely. Frustrating? For sure! But bit by bit you learned how to play certain shots to better your score. When you first started did you play St Andrews #7 with starter clubs and balls? You couldn't reach the fairway, so you learned where the best place in the rough was to be able to hit your 2nd shot from in order to give you the best chance to make a par. St Andrews par 5 14th - if you weren't sure your 2nd shot would get over the mound and rough, you aimed right because the rough was less penalising than down the middle. The really classy players would play to the other fairway on the left, but that was frought with danger as it was on the edge of WGT's view of the hole, there was only a small area to aim for.
Would the players who shoot low 50's now still be the best players back then? I don't think so - these players are gamers, everything has to be perfect for them, I'm not convinced they would have the patience to figure things out. I cannot imagine any of the current so-called superstars playing back in 2009 when all you had was starter slubs and balls (there were no credits), and all you had to begin with was CTTH's. That's where the top players back then learned to play the game, and in my mind they were far more skillful than any of the players you find on the earnings leaderboard now.
But as DodgyPutter says, the game will not go back to those good old days, it will only ever get easier, and costlier. As I read somewhere recently. WGT is now just a computer game based loosely on the game of golf, whereas before it was a good golf simulator. I shot a 56 in this past weekend's Game Day Drive tournament (not something I normally play), and my -16 was good for 194th place! Even a -18 only got you 81st place! That is how ridiulous this game has become. I remember a couple of years ago watching a video of Justin Rose and Graeme McDowell playing the new version of WGT and thinking it was good, it would be interesting to know what they would have thought of the Flash version back in the old days in comparison.