The sport has advanced in that skaters are now doing programs that combine triple-triple combinations and difficult skills and difficult steps and connections between elements and sophisticated choreography.
Personal preferences aside, pretty much any past champion including Midori Ito could easily be beaten by several strong performances from 2010s skaters even by 6.0 standards of judging.
But more to the point, the depth of the ladies' field has gotten much stronger. Skaters who were easily in the top 10 a couple decades ago would struggle to make top 24 in today's context, even if everyone were competing under the same rules and tailored their program content accordingly.
You can find eras when some of those things were equally or perhaps more important than today, and you can always find individual skaters in past eras who excelled at one or more of the above. But on average, the performances that dozens and dozens of ladies are putting out today are much more difficult in terms of overall technical content (not just jump rotations) than medalists' performances from previous eras.
I'm sure we will see occasional triple axels and quads from a handful of women in coming years and decades. I don't expect that they will ever become the norm, and necessary to win, in women's competition until there is a significant change in equipment (or human anatomy or Earth's gravity, neither of which is likely) that allows female bodies to rotate more than 3 times in the air. Improved training methods may increase the frequency of such jumps from "almost never" to "sometimes," but they're not going to become "usual" any time soon.
Personal preferences aside, pretty much any past champion including Midori Ito could easily be beaten by several strong performances from 2010s skaters even by 6.0 standards of judging.
But more to the point, the depth of the ladies' field has gotten much stronger. Skaters who were easily in the top 10 a couple decades ago would struggle to make top 24 in today's context, even if everyone were competing under the same rules and tailored their program content accordingly.
You can find eras when some of those things were equally or perhaps more important than today, and you can always find individual skaters in past eras who excelled at one or more of the above. But on average, the performances that dozens and dozens of ladies are putting out today are much more difficult in terms of overall technical content (not just jump rotations) than medalists' performances from previous eras.
I'm sure we will see occasional triple axels and quads from a handful of women in coming years and decades. I don't expect that they will ever become the norm, and necessary to win, in women's competition until there is a significant change in equipment (or human anatomy or Earth's gravity, neither of which is likely) that allows female bodies to rotate more than 3 times in the air. Improved training methods may increase the frequency of such jumps from "almost never" to "sometimes," but they're not going to become "usual" any time soon.