>>If you hide more than one cache per month, that's probably too many.
We don't need more hides. We need quality hides.
In a better vanished time, people must have actually read the Tips on Hiding Your First Geocache and they must have actually gotten the part about "Ultimately you'll want to place a cache in a place that is unique in some way. The big reward for geocachers, other than finding the cache itself, is the location. A prime camping spot, great viewpoint, unusual location, etc. are all good places to hide a cache". We used to take this business very seriously. We considered it a duty to deliver people to special places that they might not otherwise have known about. We never even considered hiding caches in uninteresting places like a Wal-Mart parking lot because we would have been ashamed to hide such a cache for our fellow geocachers.
That was then... This is now...
The community of geocachers is different. Too many of the new players just don't get it. Where, pray tell, is it written that the object of this game is to write one's name on the greatest number of waypointed stationary? It's a numbers game for many of them and they're just not going to bother with the old way of doing things. It's too much work for one measly point in their game.
Excellence, in their way of thinking, is achieved by aiming at the easiest targets and hitting them. Their precious find count is typically a gauge of their "talent" for picking out the easy ones and enduring the tedium of finding them all. It's all fine and well to play the game this way but it's probably not wise or healthy to brag about about one's degree of anal-retentiveness, which is often the case, whether they will admit it or not. In that better vanished time, fellow geocachers shared stories about the great caches they had found. Today it's more about how many guardrails they have kissed. These folks are the biggest bores that ever were.
I really don't see that this game is going to be getting any better anytime soon. It's too easy for the numbers cachers to populate the list with more than their share of lame hides because typically they have already relieved themselves of any responsibility to provide an interesting location, a decent container, swag, and proper maintenance. The quantity of caches they hide is pretty much all that matters to them. The good caches ultimately get lost in the mix and it follows that anybody who might enjoy a quality cache in the old school tradition just isn't going to give geocaching a second look when they key in their zipcode and see that this is a game of hide and seek the microscrap in parking lots.
I'm fortunate that I discovered geocaching when I did and that I got to play the game before the mass hiders of junk appeared on the scene. With due diligence and a little luck, it's still possible to find a decent cache once in awhile.
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