Saythatagain, you make some good and valid points. This is how I would respond:
It is true that their is a mailah in being machmir. Chazal say that the RBSH is nosei ponim lyisroel because although he said you must eat a kdei sviah to have to bench, they are medakdek down to a kzayis or kbeyah.
Nevertheless, one must always balance the positive versus the negative. Everything has a tradeoff. There is a story of Reb Chaim Brisker making kiddush in shul on Yom Kippur because of a fear of the plague. When they asked him why he was meikil on YK, he said, adrabah, I am machmir on pikuach nefesh.
Today we have lost 90% of all Jews to yiddishkeit. Our retention rate is very poor. If we add chumrahs today, we run the risk of losing even more. The loshon in the shulchan oruch that a women should be margil herslef not to go out too much is comparable to the loshon in shulchan oruch that a person should be margil himself to use the bathroom in the morning, so he won’t have to find one at night. This is an eitzah tova, but clearly not a halacha. In those days, they had no bathrooms in the home, and the closest one could have been many blocks away. What a pain to have to go out late at night on a long walk. In our times, while it is still good advice, clearly it is much less critical then it was back then. So times do change, and we must do what is best for our situation.
Today, since women’s income is necesary for many homes to subsist, it would be near impossible to adopt a practice of women staying home. ALso, in those days in a small shtetl, everything was probably close by. Today, the supermarket may be a few miles, and you can’t just walk, so you need to drive and make an outing out of it. Life has changed. It is not halacha which has changed, the situation has changed. If we told women to stay home, then people may not be able to afford tuition, and have to send to public school.
Life is one big shikul hadaas. If we are too machmir on one inyan, we may entirely blow another more important inyan. I doubt any posek would say it is better to send kids to public school than for a wife to earn money towards tuition. This is why we say times have changed. We have a different set of circumstances which requires different emphasis. There are pluses and minuses in everything. If I spend too much on my esrog, I may not have anything for a yontof meal, and have to avoid inviting guests and forego that mitzvah, which may be more important.
My personal opinion is we need to stress ahavas yisroel above all else these days. One must pick and choose very carefully what mitzvos to emphasize and what to deemphasize at any given time, since it is impossible to be mekayem every one in the best possible way. That is simply the metzius. I previously gave another example if you see an old lady struggling with packages when you are on the way to shul, and you can only do one of these mitzvos, which should you do? You will not have time to do both, as you will miss the minyan if you help the lady, and vice versa.