Change of attitude regarding speedsubs

What's with the change of attitude regarding speed- and qualitysubs? You know. Back in the times when Aone (considered quality group) used to release like >15 subs/month and Naruto Anime was still somewhat cool and not a pile of fillers.
People used to watch "quality" subs. A-E, Triad, Aone, L-E etc. where the groups of choice for almost everything. The (in the beginning) few people who watched speedsubs were considered dumb or as newbies (well they often were).
But then, for no apparent reason, the way things used to be and the "scene" changed. Today almost everyone is gay -not for bridget- but for speedsubs. DB and other groups like this get their subs multiple times more often downloaded than stuff from groups like Lunar.
And in the meantime the majority of /a/ considers one to be a looser for watching Mai Otome from Static subs instead of Doremi (speedsubbers). Main arguments are like "lol fancy karaoke" and "I hope you enjoy your uberstyled subs". Well of course I keep thinking "Yeah and I hope you enjoyed your crappy encode and the even worse translation" but nevermind.

How do you explain this change of attitude?

>>10
Well, obviously old subbers will always stop and new ones will start, but the question is why the newer generation seems to mainly consist of "speed subbers".  What >>2 said was pretty close to correct... the few old big dynasty groups that are left are dying and often 5-10+ episodes behind, while good quality fansubs are made faster than ever.  Naruto paints a particularly good picture of this scene:  AOne is 17 episodes, or 4 months, behind DB, yet AOne's encoding and subtitles are only marginally better; DB has quite acceptable video quality, and the subs are almost always free of errors in translation or grammar... although, compared to AOne's, they are a bit clunky and tend to not be as well written.  The days of speedsubs being comparable to what you see in a HK bootleg DVD are long gone.

It seems like what happened is that it became harder to become involved with the extremely zerocool awesome megagroups, while at the same time it became much easier to find a few people to connect with, find a show to do, and start up a group.  I think it's the expanding of anime fandom in general and the digisub scene in specific in combination with improved distribution that has created a much larger playing field than ever before, with each group only doing a few shows, thereby preventing any one group from creating the kind of dominance exhibited in the past.  Bittorrent, in particular, has allowed any random citizen on the internet to create a fansub and distribute it to thousands of fans without the need for intense uploading power and host it on any number of torrent portal sites.

At the same time, all of these things that keep groups from becoming huge like in the past prevent "brand loyalty", as >>3 brought up, to take place, and fans are just as likely to download Unknown Group A's translation as they are Unknown Group B's, and if they care at all about groups, most fans will probably be happy with whatever they got and stick with that, instead of trying to determine whose subtitles are TEHBEST.

I don't see the problem with pretty karaoke; sometimes it gets excessive, but Aone is usually a good example of very pretty kara without going overboard.  Everything else really just depends on the fan and shouldn't be argued about.  For me, bad video quality, jumpy framerate, translation errors, spelling/grammar errors, and even awkward wording can bring me out of the show and lessen my appreciation, but for others it's not a problem.  I think having dozens of small groups with a few medium size ones, like the current situation seems to be trending towards, is an ideal scenario; those groups that do excellent work will gain popularity and hopefully stay around.