Aaq, “ashkenazi” teshuvos deal with anything and everything; no *change” happened in the frequency of shailos – also do you think poskim publish every answer they gave to every question? Shu”t is a style of writing a sefer; they pick which ones they use, and some even “asked” themselves shailos to get into the sugya – if there was, in fact, a dirth of questions in a certain area, they’d just write about them stam.
Whole premise just shows that this “talmid chacham” probably is not interested in normative halacha, and prefers ethical discourse: it’s a lot easier to pontificate and give synagogue sermons to Sabbath attendees about ethics, philosophy, current events, and other things that they and the rabbi want to hear, than it is to learn halacha b’iyun.
And what is meant by “ashkenaz” – does he mean that Hungarian, German, Lithuanian, polish, galician, Russian, Latvian jews all changed wholesale into chicken shailoh based judaism, and, let me guess, the sefardim somehow didn’t, and contributed more towards business questions? Has this person ever learned kaf hachaim, ben ish chai, sdei Chemed… Anything? The topics are all the same whenever you look .
He probably just likes that sefardim are generally more meikil.