It's very hard to compare players from different eras, we don't know how they would perform today. Possibly many of today's players were not even in the world yet, or they were very small in the 0.1d/0.3 times. It is difficult to answer the question whether there was more competition - in the past or today. For example what Abdi or 210W did a few years ago with M4 was beyond the reach of many, today every second player specializes in this weapon (more or less legal, debatable).
We all have a tendency to embellish the past and have a picture of the great masters of vcmp in mind, many of them really were. On the other hand, we have players who keep at least a satisfactory level regardless of the version, and for good reason some nicknames appear more often than others.
It seems to me that the most important thing we can do is be competitive for a long time and achieve our own peak, regardless of whether it is a local tournament (yes, vcmp is also for example tournaments in Poland, which were/are really competitive, on smaller communities or just on less popular servers), an events, leagues, dunno, Vice War, being the master of one server or VCDC.
