I watched a handful of episodes from 2-8 this evening. I hadn't really noticed it before, but the amount of tasteful, stylistic bits of animation was sky high back then. Watching 12+, I never notice scenes where I think "hey, that was nicely drawn." Back in the cruder era, it happened all the time. Season two's Simpson and Delilah had a wonderful softness to the animation. There was also a transition from Smithers walking across the checkerboard floor to a pan across the outside of the building that was a great homage to Citizen Kane. A scene from an episode a few seasons later had Homer's car pulling into a driveway at night, with the headlights shining perfect circles in a very film noire sort of style. Aside from all of the references in the writing, they were equally adept at capturing them visually.
Back in the day, artistic touches like that were a big part of what made the show great. Now it's all pretty sterile with more of an eye towards realism, at least insofar as a cartoon can be realistic, as opposed to creative. I suppose it might be related to shipping everything off to Korea to be animated, rather than having it done closer to home, where the writers can have a bit more control over such things. I suppose if you're just packing the basic elements in a Fed-Ex package to ship off, and receive a finished product a few weeks later, trying to work out clever and subtle artistic touches isn't very practical.
A great example of losing this sort of touch is the final scene of Burns Verkaufen de Kraftwerk. He speaks menacingly while plunging the letter opener as the Sword of Damocles into the stuffed pig as Homer squeals in excitement. An absolutely perfectly drawn scene, with perfect timing. I've watched 12-16 over the last month and a half, and I haven't seen anything that was even a half-ass attempt at such cleverness. It's not for a lack of writing, though that's certainly a problem. It's that creative animation and what we would call cinematography in the real world is a lost art to them nowadays.
What a fucking shame.