I’d forgotten about Aadi and the awful woman.
I catch Classic Corrie when I can, and the difference between that and now is marked. Even in general scenes where most of the characters aren’t really involved in a plot they are all there, in the Rovers or the factory, with maybe a one-liner to add. Now each episode is about a small number of characters and the rest can be off-screen for months. I know they have more screen time to fill than before, but I’m not sure how that explains it.
It feels like the Covid way of filming (where they had limits on the number of people in the studio at a time) has stuck, and it’s not as good. That is partly why the storylines can drag out so much - the actors go AWOL half way through and pick up where they left off weeks later. It takes longer for new characters to ‘bed in’, too.