My questions were legitimate. If you did not learn them (even on a superficial level), you cannot sensibly claim that it is simply a chumra. I do not claim to have learned any of them b’iyun, but the roshei prokim make it very clear that it’s not as simple as, “Yeah, we just became more machmir because of those darned Chareidim.”
I sat on a bus today only to have someone stand up and move to the front of the bus after giving me a horridly dirty look for sitting beside him. So he didn’t wear a kippa, and perhaps he didn’t know better. You, however, speak of Ahavas Yisroel yet place blame of if I can paraphrase you, illogical chumras, on an entire section of frum Judaism – throwing what at the very least translates into a level of hatred that should be unacceptable. It’s perfectly fine to have shittos, and aderaba – you should be convinced what you’re doing is right or that at the very least that you are going in the right direction.
“Chareidi society is obsessed with chumros, seeing the kol korehs, bans, and cherems these days.”
The very sentence before your concerns of Ahavas Yisroel relays what very defined tones run in your wording. I’m not sure what kind of Chareidi society you are familiar with. The society I am a part of doesn’t regard any of those as anywhere close to central.
You cannot just look at the last 100 years, though those generations are the easiest to relate to. Tracking and understanding halacha, nusach, or even/especially the gemara is dependent on digging further back and understand not just the outcome, but also the cause for change. If I’m not mistaken R’ Akiva is the one who says that Yisroel is compared to a bird; just like a bird is useless without its wings, we are useless without the zekeinim. That’s not just of our generation, that’s of previous generations going all the way back.
I’m not sure what your point was with the Minchas Elozor’s daughter. Perhaps the main reason that it is such a noted event is because of how unusually large the wedding was and the special border conditions granted in order that people be able to attend the wedding; it was far from standard. Once it became normative to have a few hundred in a wedding hall and fraternizing became an issue, only then did things start changing.