I agree with every single point with you. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to watch F1, but today I don't even bother to watch the whole race even when it's live on a comfortable time.
I had to watch one or two races this season on DVR because I was not at home when the races went down. I skipped a lot of the races because... well, nothing was happening. They were just following each other in the usual 2-3 seconds at best, with no overtakes in sight, no pit stops in sight (most races are 1 stoppers so not even much of a pit excitement anymore), so... why would I not skip the actionless parts? I realized I can watch the Formula 1 race in like half the time or less. This weekend I watched it live again and... it was kinda atrocious not being able to fast forward the usual second half of the race in which the top 5 follow each other closely without ever making a slight attempt at an attack. I'm a huge fan of F1 and it's devastating for me that it became such a bore. I will never be able to have a sheer excitement, passion and support than what I have in F1 in other racing series probably, so while I root for Tarquini in WTCR, Power in IndyCar, Buemi in Formula E, etc., none of these come close to my passion for Ferrari in F1. But the races are so much worse in F1 it's not even funny.
I was talking about this with my fiancé a while ago, and she had a good analogy: The Walking Dead series on TV. While this season has been a return to form, the previous seasons have been boring. Not abysmal, not horribly acted, not ruined by outlandish scripts: simply nothing interesting ever happened, everything was padded out to infinity, character progress was halted for years. And well, this is exactly what's going in F1 right now. The races aren't abysmal in the sense they are badly organized. They don't look bad because the venues are great looking and the cars are fast and gorgeous. There is the premise for excitement given the speed, the stakes, the risk. But it just never materializes: 80% or so of the races are boring procession, another 15% are somewhat entertaining messes, but there's only maybe 1 race per year (the remaining 5%) that is a truly memorable ride from the lights to the flag.
If I didn't know any better, I'd probably take it. In the early-2000s I wasn't so distraught with the Ferrari dominance because I was a Ferrari fan and because I didn't know any better, but I did realize even then how most races were not entertaining at all. And yet, even then we had more winners, more chaos races, more overtakes, more strategy shenanigans (anything from 1 to 4 stops was good), less reliability and more unstable cars meant more twists... but this is all gone. Then, to get back to the theme of the thread, I get home on a Sunday night, check out the Formula E race I missed on DVR, and I see these Formula 1-esque cars produce a cracking race in a tight street circuit, both during its dry phase and especially so when it rains. Another different winner, another dozens of great battles and passes, a crazy championship situation with yet another leader now... and it makes me sad, in a way, because I know I'll never feel the same passion for it that I do for F1, despite the fact it's a much better series.
Formula 1 needs so little to be good again. And yet, they are failing to provide the goodness, bar occasional almost accidental excellent moments (see 2010 or 2012, but even then the non-chaotic dry races were usually not very eventful). At this point I'd be content with F1 slowly fading away, with the top drivers moving onto other series with actual action and excitement. Seeing Alonso in IndyCar or the likes of Massa and Buemi in Formula E add value to those products, and show how competitive said fields are. Because when you have 2 drivers winning like two thirds of the races in a given decade, how the fuck do you get an idea of the value of a grid? Nobody bar the top 2-3 cars have the slightest chance to fight for anything meaningful, so how's it a race anymore? This is why series like WTCR, Formula E or IndyCar keep being exciting and fun, and this is why F1 became the equivalent of an old family member you're kinda obliged to check on from time to time, but you don't really like because of the outdated views and his/her boring way of being.