You are one of the few people that I can talk to that remembers the "glory days" of easy visas in basically every country in SEA. The crazy thing is that once they started tinkering with the rules, the populations started to suffer rather than thrive.
The old saying goes "if it isn't broken, the government will fix it until it is" and I really feel as though the visas and tourism industries in all SEA countries were doing very well until the government started meddling and changing everything every couple of months.
I know people that are legally married to people in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos and even have children there but even they have difficulty maintaining visas. It's just backwards.