Ok, I will stick my neck out on this one!
CX has definitely become a far less social airline among crew during my time.
Probably the biggest change was during 1995-1997 when cockpit ULH patterns were shortened to 4 days (so we could get more days off in HKG!!!!), while cabin crew remained in accordance with their contracts. The fact that you went outbound, and then returned with completely different cabin crew tend's to split crews apart. For cockpit crew the day of arrival is the only day to go out, while Cabin crew treat this as a day of rest, and go out the next day.
My more social trips have tended to be the longer ones when you all stay together as a crew, such as 5 or 6 day Jo'burg's, Amsterdam's, Adelaide's, Bahrain's, Penang's etc. These patterns are now ancient history!
However, things are now even more challanging for various reasons.
Our new cabin crew recruits are only paid $79 per hour, for a 100 hour month. This work load does not leave much enthusiasm for going out socialising with anyone on overnight stops! Also when the basic is only 8k, saving overnight allowances to cover living costs is even more important than before.
It is understandable that when staff are so poorly paid they tend to treat their employment as a short term job, rather than a long term career. Hence high levels of sickness, lots of resignations and low levels of motivation at work. This also affects how people fit into a crew.
CX Management have chosen to ignore the fact that it has been an employees market for jobs over the last few years in Hong Kong. They continue to cut back packages for staff, and struggle to fill classes for new cabin crew, by compromising on standards.
With HKG unemployment at 3.3%, and lots of jobs paying far better than CX, our new Cabin Crew recruits are either people who failed to get better jobs, or the minority who just really want to be Cabin crew (despite the pay, etc).
No doubt our longer serving pilots could make the same observation about newer generations of CX pilots, B scaler's, Freighter pilot's, etc. Basically CX get's what it pay's for.
The declining english language skills of our younger crew are an added issue. Current crew list demographics are typically for the bottom 2/3rds of the crew to be all cantonese speakers. Basically the aircraft effectively divides into two seperate operations with the cockpit and senior cabin crew being CX, and the back of the aeroplane becoming Mongkok Airlines.
In the outport these crew prefer to not "change channel" (speak english), so are reluctant to go out with non Cantonese speakers. Maybe if we all learned to speak cantonese we could overcome this!
Nothing is going to change with regard to the social situation, so just accept it. To socialise with cabin crew, it is probably better to latch on to other airline crews. This is definitely a better option, especially if you are married to CX cabin crew!
As a Captain, you have to try and build enough of a team to face the possible challanges of the trip. This is not easy when you only get 5 minutes or so on the crew bus, and half the crew are yakking away on mobile phones etc. You just have to put in the effort to make sure that all the senior crew are comfortable to call you when something goes wrong in the cabin.