Regarding to the tackle situation would you believe it that the law is basically the same since rugby started being a amateur sport and right thru up until now?
Great question, which I have answered a few times without being asked.
Not counting the early days of the sport, the big change came when the tackled ball law was dispensed with in 1958. Before then you could not pick the ball up from the ground after a tackle without playing it with your foot first.
Therefore the ball stayed on the ground a lot. If a ball runner was stopped upright he had to pass the ball immediately or smuggle it to a team mate to do the same, or ground it. Mauls were unlawful in those days (if you were stopped standing up it was deemed a tackle and the ball had to be passed or grounded immediately).
Forwards were taught how to dribble the loose ball at their feet and there were many dribbling forward rushes in games with 2 or 3 men playing as a unit. The great All Black hooker, Ron Hemi was a master at it.
Ball at the feet was executed in a tight way too. In the 1940s and 1950s the great Otago coach, Vic Kavanagh Jr (who, like the equally great Carwyn James, was never to coach his national team) formulated techniques based on either the forwards, bound together, taking the ball up the field with the ball at their feet, like a movable scrum, or deliberately setting up a series of quick rucks to create an offside line and delivering quick ball before opponents realigned. He was decades before his time.
This was called 'rucking' in NZ though the moving upfield version of it was referred to as a 'loose scrummage' elsewhere in the world. [Now 'rucking' refers to when you shoe somebody.] But I digress. 1958 was the big change and it sped the game up, and gave birth to the modern maul since being stopped upright was no longer deemed to be a tackle.
The second big change came as you mentioned: as the game sped up referees seemed to compete with each other to speed it up more, especially in Oz and NZ. European refs were not so gung ho and talked about maintaining the fabric of the game. We laughed at them, but found out later they were in the right.
In the 60s already you could see the attacking scrummie being able to put his hands into the ruck to get the ball out: something always penalised earlier. Later other attackers also had hands in. The old practice of heeling ruck ball out with feet turned into one of getting ball out with hands. Once that was established players from both sides started going in with hands first. They had started to use hands more anyway because the ball was no longer 'poison' to pick up after a tackle.
Naturally hands first led to players from both sides arriving in a position that was likely to see them leave their feet, and they did.
20 years after the tackled ball law was dispensed with the game had changed completely, some good, some bad, but 20 years after that there was a whole lot more bad, and it got baddest of all when the pro era started. Things muddled along until 2010 when the crackdown on laws in the tackle/ruck area was implemented. Using hands became risky and the old, old practice of counter-rucking, an occasional happening before, was reborn as a major tool of the game.
The crackdown should have happened 30 years earlier, then revisited every now and then.
There will always be good referees and bad ones, just as there are such players. But if there is anything I have learned about them since I was a young bloke it is: if there are too many referees who take the easy option in an effort to speed the game up they, or their sons or grandsons who copy them, will eventually slow the game down.
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