Dunno Invictus, "the good ol' days", if they ever existed, had a different set of issues. For one, it was unlikely that all aircraft would be at exactly where they're supposed to be (which reduces the big sky considerably). For another, there are a lot more aircraft in the sky.
Whenever you have people doing a complicated task, "tunnel vision"/task saturation is a threat. For that reason, experience, usually experience from significant loss of life, has built in redundancies, and these have been designed, not as crutches, but as "wake up calls". You don't train people to rely on those warnings; you train them to avoid them, and if they happen, to heed them. Any warning system that triggers on trivial events (e.g., Internet Explorer security warnings) is useless.
In this case, a series of improbable failures occurred. Some of them disturb me in terms of how privatization and ATC management runs in Europe. From the BFU preliminary report, it appears that what happened to the ATCO was a classic example of how task saturation can be like drowning in a half-inch of water.
Ultimately, however, ATC isn't enough, and the two aircraft in question carried a failsafe system for when ATC fails. The Tu154 crew ignored a TCAS RA and elected to follow the ATCO instead. Yes, it's a sudden emergency three hours into a flight, in the middle of the night, through quiet airspace, but for whatever reason (training, disposition), if the BFU preliminary findings are correct, they made the wrong call.
I wouldn't exonerate the media either. It's very easy to explain the accident as an ATCO alone at the post, with dead phone lines and a warning system offline. And Xenophobia can only add journalistic fuel to the flames. It doesn't take much of a stretch either. Anyone else remember a BOAC Trident that "failed to yield" to an ascending jet at a crossing in Yugoslavia? The public bias in Eastern Europe is already going to be for discrimination against them in Western European countries, and it's going to be founded on centuries of mutual discrimination. All they have to do is play up the "It's standard procedure to ignore machines and listen to humans" angle (much along the same lines as "being a good pilot, he ignored his instruments and went by his own senses" resonates with the general publics), imply some bias, and all of a sudden, the ATCO is the convenient fall guy. He didn't deserve this.