In terms of spotting, there are 3 main reasons why its amount could have gone down:
1) Passive spotting has been removed - in BF4, aiming down sights at someone was enough to show that person on the minimap. Not anymore.
2) Spotting cone has been narrowed down - in previous Battlefields, you could spot someone even without really aiming accurately at them. In BF1, spotting cone was narrowed down ~4 times to prevent a common thing from previous Battlefields - spot-spamming to find people you don't actually see.
3) Spamming spot function gives you a short cooldown that prevents you from spotting for a moment (for the same reason as 2)).
On why communities are a shadow of what they were in previous Battlefields, most of community leaders give extremely basic server tools as a reason. That's pretty much it.
