It is nice to hear these perspectives, good thread.
I'm of the age to have kids playing hockey, but don't have any kids. I do seem to have noticed a shift in the desirability of the low range of higher end teams. Growing up in New England in the '90's, it seemed to me that if you were really good the goal was D1, Jr A, maybe even HS prep. Lower level juniors and DIII seemed to be viewed more as "eh, whatever". Now kids are pushing to try to get on a junior C team, or having press releases for committing to a DIII school that is essentially a community college. There are more kids playing hockey and not many more D1 or JR A teams, so that could at least explain part of it.
Pouring money into specialty youth hockey with the goal of playing high level hockey is such a crap shoot, even for very talented players. On my youth teams I played with a bunch of future DIII players, a few D1 players, a 5th round NHL draft pick, and our rival team actually had a guy currently on the tail end of a decade long NHL career. So I did get to see the development of a number of good players. It truly is a crap shoot. The best player I played with just stopped growing at 5'5". Yes, technically not impossible to move up the ranks at that height, but orders of magnitude harder than if you are 6'2" or something. Barring injury or something fluky, I fully believe he would have made it to the NHL if he had decent size.
Meanwhile, the kid who was drafted, I was a winger on his line for a number of years. He was very obviously very talented. However, he was also very lazy. He could get away with it as he was just a notch better than 95% of the other players on the ice. But he never went further than a D1 3rd liner. I saw him play a college game and it was amazing seeing the exact same lazy habits on the ice that he had as a 12 year old. He just didn't have the drive on the ice that was necessary.
I'm a bit involved with the local youth program and I'm amazed by the apparent indifference by some of the kids. Their parents are spending time and money on travel teams and camps, but the kids show little to no interest in playing informally. For example, I try to organize neighborhood street or roller hockey games and the same kids who will drive 10 hours to a tournament, don't want to get off their couch and walk to two blocks to play street hockey. When we were kids (and somewhat still...) my brother and I would play any type of hockey, any time. Even things like playing in the driveway with a frisbee after losing all our balls and our folks wouldn't take us to the store. So I hope their folks are enjoying the trips because clearly those kids do not have the drive to go much of anywhere playing hockey. Over the years, I've also come to the conclusion that I love playing hockey more than at least 95% of players 🙂