Are standards really rising? This seems to be the substance of fenderfour's argument.
Lets say you have a total pool of a thousand climbers in a bygone era and ten of them can climb 5.12, and one can climb 5.13. 5.12 is therefore the pinnacle of difficulty, and 5.13 an unrepeatable achievement.
Now fastforward 50 years. There are a million climbers. Only one in 100 climbers can still climb 5.12, but that means 10,000 climbers out of the million can climb 5.12, and a thousand climb 5.13. So 5.12s and 13s are getting done daily.
This seems to be NOLSe's argument - that more climbers can do it therefore what is moderate has changed. But what I think f4 is arguing is that the relative proportion of climbers who can climb a particular grade has not changed. If you define "moderate" as what 50% of the climbing population can climb, for instance, that would not have changed much or at all between the two time periods and might still be at 5.9.
Personally I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps moreso for sheer technical difficulty than all-around ability. In mountaineering, things that were done or attempted 20 or 30 years ago like the N ridge of Latok 1 or the Shining Wall of G4 are still handing repeat suitors their asses regularly despite the rise in technical standards.