As a subscriber to Pilot for the last 6 years, I must confess to having been decreasingly satisfied by the content in the last 12 months. A lot of it's intangible, but some of the nagging feelings that I had have been identified by contributors to this thread. My general feeling is that it's a bit prescriptive; there's the mandatory 'new ultratight' [non deliberate typo, but I left it as I liked the term
!!] article, the 'flying a historic/unusual type' article, the 'I flew somewhere overseas' article, the 'report on a big GA meet', the 'interview with someone big in aviation who's about to retire'....., etc. For my personal interests, I find the Old Timers section seems to be getting bigger and bigger and more 'anorakky' [I fully confess to being less than interested in avaiation history, so am maybe being a little harsh here] and the 'How Air-Minded Are You?' test seems to include less questions about aviation knowledge that could reasonably be expected to be known by a fair cross-section of the GA community [ such as 'Which country's registrations are the only ones to be all-numeric?' - that's one you'll either know or not, usually because you fly in or around that country, so is not really a check of 'air-mindedness'].
Aerobatic Flyer - like you, I was similarly appalled by the quality of the illustrations for the sidelipping article and felt that the whole tone of the article massively overdid the 'mystery' of sideslipping - it's a good technique that needs to be practised for the first time at safe altitude, but it's not rocket science to a qualified PPL if approached with caution.
I did respond to the survey a few months ago in this tone and suggested that the education and safety content could aford to be increased and the historic element reduced [all IMHO, of course].
My subscription runs out this month; I have not yet renewed, as I have been considering trying Today's Pilot for the next year. There are, however, some aspects of Pilot that I enjoy and would genuinely miss - I tend to feel that on balance, I'll renew my Pilot subscription, but with less of a feeling that it's a 'no-brainer' decision.