So there's been a fairly sizable overhaul of how the game plays recently. Not sure if some of these changes were pre-existing or if they're all from the last week's update, but it's like this now:
-Pokemon spawn rates are WAY up. I would speculate probably quadrupled. Granted you'll still see tons of crappy filler Pokemon, but you can now easily afford to pick and choose what you want. You're no longer obligated to just catch every Pidgey, Spearow, or Weedle you see, you can now just focus on one of those plus whatever better stuff you come across and still be pretty much constantly engaged while walking around.
-Pokestops give WAY more items. Probably at least double, and the maximum number of items possible is much higher. I would speculate that Pokeball drop rates have been boosted as well, they seem to be well over half of total items now.
-There's now a daily reward bonus that gives bonus experience for the first Pokemon caught of the day and a ton of bonus items for the first Pokestop visited in a day. These rewards count consecutive days and apparently do something after seven days in a row, no idea what.
-Training at gyms has been overhauled to be much easier. It's now exactly the same as battling an opposing gym. You can bring a whole team and you can be KOed, but because it's now much more plausible to take down the entire gym solo the amount of experience you can give to friendly gyms is MUCH higher. This means rank-10 gyms are very common, which means they're not quite as liable to change hands repeatedly over a single day as they were before.
I know it's too little too late and most people are beyond caring, and we're still missing a bunch of essential features that were promised months ago, but it's some progress and for my money it's made the game quite a lot more fun to play. Probably not enough to reel people back in, but if we can get trading, boss battles, and maybe some new Pokemon implemented this might start to fully feel like a real game.