Who else thinks apex has gone down hill?

"I’ve had so many people quit on me because they got knocked they didn’t get tired of waiting for someone to craft or grab their banner they just left because they got knocked"

The thing about this scenario is that you will never know with any certainty WHY it is that they quit. Yes, on the surface of things you saw the knock and it was followed immediately by a quit. But it isn't always that simple. I get knocked rarely, but when I do I'm not reflexively instaquitting. I'm assessing several different factors including what stage of the game we're in and whether it is even feasible or logical to try and res a downed teammate, and even more importantly I'm assessing HOW I got downed. If it was by a player who is obviously cheating, or who should never have been in my lobby to begin with... do I really need to hang around and give him another change to pad his k/d? I already know how that match ends and even though my squadmates don't, I don't need to stand there helplessly and witness the atrocity. Just one example.

"I personally like being able to drop in with my guns and shield because once people hear the drop ship come in then they all run to it like a dinner bell"

If it's early-game then your squadmates should have found a beacon far enough away from the action that you don't get the dinner bell effect. If it's late-game... then I still say that getting killed should have a down side. Getting overrun by enemies on the respawn is that downside. There shouldn't be a series of get-out-of-jail-free cards to prop up players who get themselves killed. If you let them get you then there should be a price to pay. I get that people don't ever want matches to end, at least not in defeat, and it's particularly frustrating in this game because the thing that has ended a given match has often happened MINUTES before the match is actually over. So what are you supposed to do with all that pointless time if you're the player who KNOWS it's all done but you still have hapless squadmates who are completely unaware of what's going on around them or who foolishly believe "it's not over until it's over?"

"at E district if I don’t drop hot I’m not going to fight anyone until the end of game"

There's an art and a science to taking control of your own pace-of-play, and that skill set works on any map. But leaving that aside I will still stand up for different sized maps on the grounds that I think for most players, who don't control their pace, it's probably a good thing that Respawn does it for them with different sized maps. Sometimes a slower match is a good thing. Sometimes a fast-paced crapfest is exactly what you want. I like the variability and I'm a little surprised when people, and it's almost all of them, express a desire to drop, loot for 30 seconds, and then get right to the bloodshed. There are so many games out there that do this. Arena shooters are everywhere so why do they come to a battle royale game if what they really want is a breakneck pace and infinite and easy respawns? If it's Apex weapons and movement they love then why aren't they playing in Arenas or Mixtape? It confounds me.

Then again I have to admit that I'm that player who actively avoids confrontation until there are only three squads left. I'm that guy you would HATE to have on your team. You would be bored to death. So I get it. Different people like different things.

"how am I supposed to better myself if all I do is loot"

Now that I get. For me, I readily acknowledge, improvement was an extremely slow affair. And that worked okay for me. Honestly, I played 1400 matches a season for the first five or six seasons, and I didn't even pick up a gun until season three, and I didn't start shooting with them until season five. I know, incomprehensible. But the mainspring of my play style is that I don't like being killed. I don't even like being shot at. So I hunkered down and took a lot of time to learn the legends, the maps, and the processes of the game. Apart from engagement. That came later. A lot later. But here I am six years later and I'm very, very hard to kill because I made it my business to spend years learning how to be hard to kill. I don't get a lot of kills myself, but that's a trade I'm happy to make.

I guess that's all a round about way of saying a couple of things about "improvement." It comes all on its own, one way or another, no matter what you do. And also: when it stops then it stops. And it doesn't matter how much more grind you put in. We all have our own ceiling. Know where it is and stop punishing yourself because you don't have Xim and fistful of Adderall like everyone else in the game. Does that make any sense?