I'm not using my own salary history as a benchmark. The IGDA salary surveys and my exposure to a range of developers seem to bear out my remarks. As for how I know salaries outside of public surveys, I am on a private forum where people talk about both their own salaries anonymously and what their companies typically offer when hiring.

I appended a paragraph to the original post explaining the effect of coolness on first-job salaries. I do think it plays a role there. Companies like EA are notorious for using fresh graduates as a revolving source of underpaid labor. As for long hours, my impression (here I have no survey data) is that it's become much rarer.

I think what happened economically is that by the early to mid 2000s, the main technical challenges of game development had almost nothing to do with anything specific to games. Compare that to the impression of game development you might have gotten from reading Abrash's articles on Quake. Because of that, good game programmers were able to easily get jobs outside of games, and good non-game programmers were able to quickly get up to speed on gamedev specifics. Hence wages equalized. That also explains why wages for designer and artists are still relatively lower.