Yes, I agree - you had much fewer pre-existing ideas to guide you, and really good new ideas were coming out all the time and you could pick between them - you could do all kinds of innovative things and they would really be novel.

Although today we have a much better grasp on formal semantics, which makes it easier to make up new ideas. But those new ideas aren't likely to ever displace the old ideas popularly, and it's hard to come up with them in the first place since old ideas live in your head...