The game itself has not changed, so it still makes sense to compare players across time. It would be nice if we had a quantitative way of doing this; so we can make statements like 'the average proffessional player today is better than 20 years ago, a typical modern pro would win 60% of the time again one from 20 years ago).
In some sense, it is not surprising that we do not have a system that accomplishes this. Since it is impossible to see the results of a game between players living in different time periods, we cannot get any data to prevent drift. You can still try to normalize the rankings. However, unless you have some independent way of measuring skill, you would need to make an assumption about the relative strength of players. Assuming the average skill of a proffesional is constant across time is probably not accurate, but closer to reality than what you get with unchecked inflation.
You can sort of solve the inflation problem by zscoring the elo. Now a person's score will tell you how much better or worse they are than the median player, assuming an underlying normal distribution (reasonable).
Of course, scores will only be comparable if the average skill of all players remain constant. I would imagine this isn't true, but the drift over several decades is probably small.
Unless you start introducing some purely objective criteria for skill, which can never work, this is the best you can do. It's still way way better than a straight elo system though.
Rating distributions are often not normal because some subset of players study the game and take it more seriously resulting in a bimodal distribution. See [0] for an example in Chess.
Even without the bimodality, you wouldn't expect a normal distribution of ratings.
1. Assume that chess ability is normally distributed in the population.
2. Assume that people who are terrible at chess are more likely to stop playing chess than people who are successful.
Then you've sampled the underlying normal distribution mostly from the top end, and that new, highly skewed distribution is what you'll see when you measure everyone's rating.
The idea that chess has not changed in a long time is simply not true. Two huge and relatively recent changes were the addition of chess clocks and premoves.
And aside from the mechanics of how the game is played, there have been massive changes in the popularity of chess (first massively upwards, recently possibly down slightly), as well as how analyses are done.
It would be very difficult to account for these factors in a way that keeps comparisons across 30-year+ time spans meaningful.
In some sense, it is not surprising that we do not have a system that accomplishes this. Since it is impossible to see the results of a game between players living in different time periods, we cannot get any data to prevent drift. You can still try to normalize the rankings. However, unless you have some independent way of measuring skill, you would need to make an assumption about the relative strength of players. Assuming the average skill of a proffesional is constant across time is probably not accurate, but closer to reality than what you get with unchecked inflation.