Agree with both of those.
The current fares setup is indistinguishable from one that has been formally designed around the principle that in buying a rail ticket you are not merely performing the necessary preliminaries for a train journey, you are in addition committing yourself to suffer a given standard measure of grief. You are given a variety of choices over how much grief you suffer through buying the ticket being a pain in the arse, how much through using it being a pain in the arse, and how much through just being plain straightforwardly ripped off; but you don't get a choice to just make a train journey without having to undergo any kind of metaphorical smack in the guts.
But I do get that very basic thing if I decide to go by car. It costs exactly the same whenever I want to use it; all I have to do is go to the petrol station and give them some money; nobody does something to the petrol so it only works on one particular road at one particular time of one particular day; nobody tries to seduce me into suffering the hassle of maintaining means to pass the payment through some parasitic third party so they can skim it by illogically making the petrol more expensive if I don't, or tries to make me pay for it other than at the time I actually get it. And moreover, I always have a comfortable seat and I always have a good view.
None of this is exactly complicated or somehow impossible for the railway to produce. Quite the opposite in fact - it's what you get automatically, with no effort at all, simply by not bothering to invent ways to make things more complicated and awkward. And once upon a time it was quite normal for train seats to have big springy soft cushions and be lined up with the windows (which after all is what the windows are for), which is fine evidence that they could perfectly well build them like that now except they can't be arsed.
This dumb worship of the even dumber idea of having the railway competing with itself has obscured what surely ought to be very obvious, that if it has to be said or desired to "compete" with anything - or, more sensibly, if it needs to provide a useful alternative to anything - then that "thing" is not other trains, but first and foremost cars. And in comparison with cars it already has some formidable disadvantages which arise from differences too fundamental to ever be avoided - needing to stop at stations instead of your actual destination, for instance, or be slow and indirect because of hostile geography - with what it must in all honesty be admitted is only a rather weak set of positive points of comparison as a counterbalance. It's nothing short of bloody daft to make the comparison even less favourable by loading the railway with artificial complications and difficulties that only exist by decree, and which never have to even cross your mind if you use a car instead.
(And yeah, mobile phones; I am well aware that they are not fit for use with their standard software, and while I would be technically able to sanitise one, I really, really, really can not be arsed. It means not just ripping out all the spyware crap but replacing the entire software suite with one which is not designed to facilitate the exfiltration of personal information. Way too much hassle and the thing is still physically useless because of the stupidly small screen with no bash protection and the absence of a keyboard. If I even wanted a mobile computing device - which I don't; apart from anything else I appreciate the break - then a laptop running Linux would be much more usable at enormously less expense in both money and hassle.)
It is true that some things on the railways have got better. Accessibility of stations is a point where there has been a great deal of improvement (though please choose some colour to paint the ramps which is derived from camo rather than the Sixth Doctor's fashion sense), and the provision of wheelchair toilets on trains is to be applauded (even if the designer of the door mechanisms was headhunted from a manufacturer of booby traps). Getting between train and platform still not great: at least with a guard's van you could easily pick out where to aim for to find a ramp and a helping hand, but too many trains these days just look the same all the way along and you've no idea where to go.
Cleanliness of interiors and seat cushions has also got a lot better since they discovered hoovers, and the windows are usually washed better than they used to be; still get some murky offerings, but not the approach to opacity that you used to find.
Not having the saloon fill with fumes of unburnt diesel from the heating system is a definite advantage of modern DMUs over the old ones, but other stock was always fine for warmth as long as the loco was able to provide it; the ridiculous unreliability of steam heat boilers or the substitution of no-heat locos were the kind of things that caused problems. But then a no-heat loco was considerably better than a cancelled service, which is what you'd most likely get in an equivalent situation these days.
Ambience and general pleasantness of station environments has gone right down the pan, though. Smaller stations simply make it too hard to get out of the weather. As the size increases, you start to get afflicted with the constant blare of superfluously verbose and repetitive automatic announcements. Large stations, you get glaring lights and garish colours and stuffy smells and the deliberate exacerbation of overcrowding by corralling passengers into this sensory overload zone to try and flog them expensive crap, thereby also preventing you from locating your train and getting aboard in your own time, and condemning you to the barrier scrum followed by the race for a seat... which sucks if you're not actually able to race.