they're scraping the bottom of the barrel more and more just to find guys just willing to take the job in the first place.
When I was a child in the 80s, there was a caste of professional ministerial servants in my congregation and in neighboring congregations. These were men who had been faithful, but who weren't particularly skilled or respected. The vast majority weren't really interested in being elders. A few did, but they were usually the type of men who didn't seem to be made of "elder material."
In the mid-90s, these men started getting promoted to elder. The first guy was a professional MS who'd been badly wanting to be an elder for a long time. I seriously believe his IQ was barely above mentally retarded. Nice guy, but incredibly dim-witted. Before long, the old elder group of the 80s had largely been replaced with this new crop. A lot of the 80s elders burned out. Some developed health problems. Others had dysfunctional families that caused them to be removed from the position.
By the time I left in the early 00s, the elder body had become a joke. It completely lacked the gravitas that the body had in the 80s. After I left, I started learning that they were elevating just about any male with a pulse. Guys who'd just been hanging around the KH for years leading double lives were being elevated first to MS then to elders. The only criteria seemed to be a pulse, regularly reporting time in field service, and no recent judicial action.
I thought it couldn't get any worse, but it somehow did.