I don't think it's about progress so much as topicality -- the widely-maligned "relevance." A Restoration comedy about vainglorious mercenaries and cuckolded hu

I don't think it's about progress so much as topicality -- the widely-maligned "relevance." A Restoration comedy about vainglorious mercenaries and cuckolded husbands might be better than an episode of Seinfeld on an objective measure, if one could be devised -- but I dare say it would have a fair bit less to say to you or me than it had to say to its original audience. We find more recent works more interesting than older ones, not necessarily because they're better, but because they speak to us more usefully -- similarly, we can find surprisingly old works surprisingly relevant for the same reason, or can rediscover materials that previous generations scoffed at. Most of the plays of Shakespeare fall into this last category -- they were hardly ever performed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and when they were, they were jazzed up with special effects along the lines of fireworks and performing bears. The gulf between the 18thC and our own is an enormous one in general, come to think of it; play _Empire: Total War_ for a sense of just how different even the visual aesthetics of their era were from our own. Don't look at the art assets that are, necessarily, more or less faithful to the period; look at how the game's developers try to make the era look interesting to a modern. What most stood out to me was the vast gulf between the national flags used in the 18thC and national flags depicted in the game -- in particular Austria, where the red-and-white national flag is replaced by the yellow-and-black dynastic flag of the Habsburgs, and Russia, where the white-red-blue national flag is shame-facedly tacked on to the Romanov coat of arms. (The loading screens are the second most extreme illustration.)