More boring, perhaps. An almost total lack of variety in the women's game - all baseline bashing - and the men not too far behind. Power plus the double hander has killed adventurous net play. It's reduced to a mopping up tactic.

Largely agree with Oakland.  I don't think the standard is overall any lower than previous years, but there is certainly less variety in playing styles.  In fact, as Oakland says, I think, due to the longevity of playing careers these days, the standard at the top end is higher than ever, although (Miss Williams jnr aside) there is less than ever between them.  I don't have too much knowledge of the ATP ranking system, currently or historically, but with the women it has always been relatively easy to get to 500-600 by playing a full schedule and picking weaker tournaments (clearly assuming a certain standard of player in the first place).

Personally, think tennis at the moment is just great!!

You can only earn a living in other sports because people will pay for the entertainment you provide and I for one spend much more watching football even though passionate about tennis. A lot of the money generated on the ATP tour and at slams is around a passion for attending a very desirable social event rather than being passionate about the game itself. This is reflected in its media coverage, intense for two weeks and getting honourable mentions when there is success, but otherwise a paragraph.

The college system and the money that funds it is a happy accident for tennis players funded by better athletes playing high quality sport for nothing.

Given this background the continued advances in every aspect the top players have made is admirable, UK players who make a serious impression on elite junior tennis do get opportunities to progress but I agree unless you are outside the best 10 juniors in the world at 17 turning pro as a teenager is a courageous choice which makes the achievements of the likes of James Ward truly remarkable.

Just to jump back on an old thread, I think the rankings can be split into several categories.

In fact the women's game is even easier to categorise at present:

1. top 10 - it might not even be that many now... Dominate the game i.e Serena, Sharapova
2. GS ranked - 10 -40 - good enough to stay at this level, but not good enough to break into the top 10 - i,e Sloane Stevens, Pliskova
3. mid ranked - 41- 120 - very interchangeable, winning at WTA events, but struggling to do it consistently - i.e Heather, Brengle, McHale
4. 120 -280 - Regular ITF challenger players 25K +
5. 281 -500 - successful on the 10K circuit, but struggling to step up - i.e Dunne, Dart
6 500 -750 - reasonably successful on 10K circuit, but not winning regularly - i.e Stephenson, Brown, Deigman
7 751+ - the also rans - capable of picking up occasional points, but not regularly i.e Drew, Sills, Hurst

There are opportunities to jump out of the brackets and injuries and youngster often skew the data, but I think most players fall into certain categories - (some are on potential due to age)

For GB:
1 - no -one yet
2. Konta
3. Watson, Broady, Robson*
4. Moore, Swan
5. Dunne, Dart, Boulter, Christie, Webley-Smith, Carreras, Njoze, Lumsden, Taylor, Arbuthnott, Whybourn,
6. Stephenson, Deigman, Brogan, Brown, Appleton, Foster, Silva*
7. Drew, Askew, Asghar, Sills, Hurst, Gibson, Konotopseva, Bamburac,

It's surprising just how accurate these group descriptions are having followed the women's game for a while now.

I agree with the majority of where you placed our players, although I think putting Swan in group 4 is slightly premature. She hasn't really had the opportunity to play at that level yet & yes looking at her junior record you'd think she'd be a certain bet to get to that level and even higher but more often than not the jump to pros isn't as simple as that. Having almost completely put juniors behind her I'm intrigued to see how she gets on this year. Tara is a player who a couple of years ago I would've said is definitely group 4-worthy but since 2014 she's slowly regressed to the point now where she's almost stuck in a limbo-like state between 10Ks and 25Ks. It's been really sad to see as I for one thinks she has bags of potential to at the very least be a top 150 player.  

This highlights the main problem though - that there is a clear lack of depth between our top WTA players and our satellite players. Freya is showing some signs of being able to make the move to challengers at a competitive level, however again it's too early to say. Harriet and Katy seem to have stagnated but they're young and have time. Mandy on the other hand has been stuck around this level for years now and I can't see that changing anytime soon. Katie B's trajectory before she got injured looked as though it was heading towards the challengers. Fingers crossed she can get back to that kind of form. Not forgetting Eleanor Dean, again someone successful at 10Ks looking to move up until injuries got in her way. It'd be great to see Lisa getting back to winning challenger matches too. Sam Murray would've occupied a group 4 slot not too long ago, has she retired for good? Any news on Jade Windley too?

Eden was on the way up, making a 10K final and a SF as well as QFs on a regular basis before she got injured. It's coming up to a year now. 

I suppose you could argue that there should be a group 8, for players who are just trying to qualify to get into the main draw such as: Crouch, Covington, Dixon, Mullins, the Pitaks, Ghodrati, Nicholls etc. 

Katie S was based on potential and what the other top juniors have done recently. We'll see in a few weeks when she plays the 25ks and the grass season.

I disagree with the original premise, for the womens side at least.
The problem is, with such broad ranging assertions - the whole of the game through large horizontal and vertical slices - it takes so very long to say enough about each of them to reason a counter point.
Short of writing, at great length, a couple of hundred words about each statement and deconstructing them, providing the relevant evidence in each instance, it's nigh impossible to usefully progress the argument.
Even I, who sleep about 2 hours a day, don't have that time; at the moment! I may return inn future to tackle it though.

However, as just one example of one facet of one of the things stated, here is how it might look were I to begin to break it down, even a little bit:
"2. GS ranked - 10 -40 - good enough to stay at this level, but not good enough to break into the top 10 - i,e Sloane Stevens, Pliskova"
Firstly, Pliskova has been ranked in the top 10 already, for a total of 6 weeks to date.
You could argue that this is not 'a Top 10 player', what was meant was a player that gets there and stays there for a long period of time - okay, but that would be a misleading label then. Top 10 is Top 10, and that's what we should take it to mean. Karolina Pliskova, is one.
There is a useful gradation to be made about those sorts of players that are considered, by what ever measure, the 'top' players of their generation(s - careers being so prolonged now!), but that doesn't always correlate with Top 10 ranking, it's a smaller group than that, but it always has been, as far back as you look.
Furthermore, 10-40 in the women's game is far too broad a grouping (the groupings get exponentially broader the further you go down the rankings), there is a massive difference between WR40 and WR20. The points required are typically, in a fashion that has been sustained over time, approximately double those for WR20 that they are for WR40; for WR10 it's 50% again on top of that required for WR20. Even then within those bands there are always large hurdles internal to those groupings, where a big step of points is required to get you even a single place - 60 points might earn you 2 extra places atone end where 400 points would leave you stationary at the other.
Well, that's nice enough, the boundaries being arguable, or imprecise, or needing refinement. But, does that unravel at all the central thread? To some extent, yes it does because it is predicated on emphasising how few genuinely 'good' players there are, and that within broad groups, you can effectively pin players down in to one of them and they are that sort of player. If those groups don't really exist, or at very least have vastly different properties, boundaries and overlaps, then to all intents and purposes they cease to be useful.
The purposes of this grouping seems to be to show players just below the 'good' threshold, those that Ben Rothenberg & Courtney Nguyen insist on, infuriatingly, calling irrelevant - which reduces: to they won't win Grand Slams. Additionally, given the original premise - that standards have dropped compared to past times - that there are more of these players. Talented, but they will stay in this arbitrary grouping, and not make it into 'relevance' i.e. in to the Top 10.
Well, historically, that's not true either. In the first 40 years of the WTA, from 1973-2014, there were a grand total of 107 different players who at one time or another had a ranking somewhere in the top 10; Dominika Cibulkova was #108. That's 2 or 3 new names a year, over a long period of time; just 2 or 3. Roberta Vinci will, on Monday become #117. So in the last 2 years, that's 10 more. If I were to draw bad conclusions from a tiny sample size and a very unscientific method I could say that that's 5 a year, and so rates are increasing, massively. I won't say that, but you take the point. It is at least fair to say that rates are not declining. At least as many players are breaking in to the Top now, as ever, if not, more so.
What does that show? Perhaps it underlines the general point originally put forward: because there are fewer 'relevant' players now, of course it's easier to break in to the Top 10 - there's nothing of quality to beat to get there. Conversely it's equally arguable - and I would come down on this side, with many more hundreds of words (and charts!) if I had the time - that it's actually illustrating the substantial rises in quality throughout the women's game.
The standard is now so high, and finely honed, that just below the very elite (Williams, Azarenka, Sharapova, an on form Kvitova) it's more competitive than ever, and there is an increased churn in that set of players that makes it seem as though none of these players are consistent, whereas in fact it's indicative of the increased competitiveness. Players can now beat each other with a statistically relevant frequency, much further down the rankings than in previous generations. The progression of quality towards a common flat line standard, instead of a steep curve, does not speak to a lack of quality, rather, it speaks very forcibly for it.

Ok, well, Im still not done with even one example of one facet of one of the things stated, but I'll stop here, for now.
I'd need to do this for all of the statements in order to make my case sufficiently thoroughly, as a lot of the things overlap and reinforce the others. e.g. why is there a very elite few, and is it relevant even if there is, hasn't that always been the case?
So, hopefully you get the point I'm trying to make about the size of the undertaking, far an almost inevitably, at best, Pyrrhic victory.

Anyway, interesting stuff; my reading others views, that is, perhaps I could cure my own insomnia if I read through one more time what I've written!