[qdotme]

I guess we might have opposite experiences. Part of which I understand - the society moved on, the modern ways are more mature and developed… but I wonder how much of that can be backported without handing over to the centralized systems again.

The advantage of old-school was partially that the user agents, were in fact user agents. Greasemonkey tried to bridge the gap a bit, but the Web does not lend itself to much user-side customization, the protocol is too low level, too generic, offering a lot of creative space to website creators, but making it harder to customize those creations to user’s wants.