All in all the quality in my opinion is about the same. It all depends on where you are and what you like to find. In the northwoods we still find many ammo boxes, but when closer to the populated areas there are more micros. But there are still quality hides all over the state, If you want to find a hidden jem, search out a regular cache in a urban area, usually there will be a nice park or green space.

I agree also

Quality of Hides:

There are so many more hides now than when we first started. Back then, everyone was new and exciting for us. GPS receivers weren;t quite as good as they are now which made things a little dicey on coords. These days many caches are placed with cell phones and at times those too can have some shakey coords but concering cache placement, the satellite maps have helped a lot.

There’s many more players in the game and the creativity that’s out there can be pretty impressive.

I think there’s a natural ebb and flow to the game as people learn more about creating hides and gain experience, trying to improve the caches they place.

I like to try and give feedback on caches that have been placed by newer cachers, letting them know what I’ve found that works well and not so well but leaving it up to them on how they want to hide their caches since they are a reflection of the CO and the caches are theirs to do with as they wish.

I haven’t been at this for too long so I don’t really think that the quality of hides has really changed very much. I would say that my own caching habits have changed a bit. The first year that I was geocaching I didn’t really even try for the difficult caches. Once I got over my fear they got a little addicting. I also often went for PNG’s because I was determined to get a respectable amount of finds under my belt. Now I pretty much skip those PNG’s unless I’m just have a few minutes to kill, usually before I pick my kiddos up from school.

I can’t remember who it was who told me this, I think it might have been Sandlanders, but they advised me to hide the type of caches that I like to find. I’ve tried to do this myself ever since and quite enjoy making interesting containers or placing the caches out in the woods on a nice trail. I think I would encourage others to do the same, but also recognize that everyone likes to geocache differently so there isn’t one formula on what makes a great cache.