The Golden Age of X is always behind us.. otherwise we wouldn't nostagically remember it. For my oldest collegues, the golden age of desktops was before any of these "desktops" came out.. just twm, xaw and do your thing. For others it was the time of the many window managers (e, sawfish, fvwm, etc etc.) Others it is the GNOME 2.0 KDE 3 days. And in 10 years it will be when we had the competition between the full deals: Android, KDE4, GNOME3..
All of that skips over the fact that each of those periods were complete crap at the time and we only think we had it good because we forget all the segfaults.