The main difference I have noticed over the years is that the tempo of the daily grind during 'normal' home-based ops has increased markedly. With regard to flying, this is because the numbers of engineers and aircrew have been cut down to the minimum that can possibly do the job, meaning that those remaining increasingly work flat-out all day (not helped by increasing numbers of additional 'good idea' core training policies and the steady increase in length of pre-deployment training courses). We can still get things done, but the days of "lunches of the month" and regular early stacks seem a distant memory. I guess this is all to be expected given the emphasis on value for money and accountability - still, it has changed the ethos over the years.
The pace of the daily grind has also increased beyond all recognition in the HQs. This is not so much about staff numbers as it is about process. There used to be spending reviews every couple of years, but now they're annual and seem to occupy the whole year. The safety and assurance worlds are also generating an unreasonable volume of work, I think mainly because the practitioners don't have the self-confidence to know when they have already made an adequate case and continue to pursue everything down to utter minutiae.
The result of all this is that everyone seems to be working flat out, all the time. I still see glossy magazines with pictures of people off on adventurous training expeds or at ski champs - but in all honesty I don't know which bit of the RAF they're working in, it's certainly not one I recognise!