The increased professionalism/exposure of the sport enables improvement in the sense of bigger scouting departments and better access to talent around the country than in the past. There's improvement in the sense there are more scouts, more resources, like the internet: videos and football sites offering statistical indicators -- like QBs completion % + number of starts in college.
But scouting itself still isn't a science, a technique, or something pragmatic that the evaluation of a player itself is getting better or worse than the evaluation of a player 20-50 years ago. The art of scouting is always still an opinion, a gut feel, a crap-shoot, guesswork, and other irrational methods.....(like drafting players named Napoleon, drafting someone because they resemble a past champion, or they come from a certain program, or they grew up somewhere, or they went to some high school that historically has a lot of famous/successful people from all walks of life come from it, or because they are a son/nephew of either a former star or a former player of that team, like combine and Wonderlic numbers, etc).
There are just as many reaches and early-round busts as there are late-round and undrafted gems becoming stars, today as there was 20-50 years ago. All scouting is like is trying to pick the winning horse in each race. There's no science that can establish a system of improved hit/miss rate. If there was, there would be no reaches still, no early-round busts and late-round/undrafted gems still. But the rate of these continue to happen as they always did before.
Scouting is identifying talent, that's it. It's like identifying what's beautiful or not. The understanding of 'talent' or 'beauty' never changes, and has no bearing on whether a player actually becomes a good or bad player, translates to a good/bad pro-player. Coaching itself is a science, or an approach, to turning acquired talent into good players, but even that there's no certified system or approach.
