You're right, Terry, and I only watched Leonard talking to a beaten fighter yesterday on Contender III stating how he had been knocked down by a light-heavyweight (Lalonde). I also think a major turning point in the sport's decline came after Boom Boom's fight with Kim in 1982, after which too many people decided what was right for the sport.
Too many cooks.
The advent of the IBF followed and then the WBO, and those following the sport could no longer keep tabs on the growing number of world champions, especially as a host of other alphabet boys emerged from the woodwork in the 1990s offering an increasingly diluted set of world rankings and thus weaker and weaker world champions, not to mention an increasing number of weight divisions.
On top of all that, 'International' and 'Intercontinental' titles were offered by these alphabet boys to cable-TV networks for billing purposes, and still are. What was the difference between a WBC International champion and a WBC champion to an armchair fan? Not much, when in reality there was a world of difference.
The modern game can be summed up as such: too many titles, too many weights.