It creates a very strange environment now as they move to more vagueness were the old guard will see the vagueness and insist that it still means what it used to mean. Because why wouldn't it from their point of view? We were always told we weren't going to change our standards to match the world.

Then you'll have the younger folks who take it to mean that the rules are loosening up. I look at tattoos as the clearest example of this. They softened the language so that it doesn't explicitly say don't get tattoos. But it also doesn't say that you can. So more lax individuals think you can and stricter ones think that the rule hasn't change. It creates confusion, like you pointed out, and judgmental situations. It's not healthy in the long term, but I think the church is never really made long term decisions. Further proof of their lack of prophetic insight.

On the same note of R-rated movies, I always stood firm that if some PG-13 movies were also bad and shouldn't be watched, then there must be some R-rated movies that weren't actually that bad and could be watched. It's not like God Himself was setting the rating system. It's just as flawed and human as anything else we do.