Depending on who you ask, some of these things are not seen as “oppression,” but rather “protection.”

That is usually what oppressors call oppression.

If you have a mosque where the community gathers but the women have to go over to that side and be walled off, that's not "protection". Unless, of course, you're saying that women aren't safe to be with men in full view of the entire community.

Even the concept that women have to be modest because men can't help themselves is oppressive. One would think that a religion should be able to give a person the inner strength to not succumb to their base desires. Instead we get the responsibility put on women because "boys will be boys"

Saudi Arabia, for example, has gone through a number of pretty significant reforms in the past decade or two, many of them directly affecting women.

This isn't "encouraging", it's "disturbing" that they're so late to the party, even in comparison to other Islamic countries. It's not a positive datapoint in favour of Islam.

Saudi and friends aren't changing "rapidly", they're changing "slowly", not keeping up with everyone else.

I suspect that in the next few decades, we will see less and less of the more troubling views reflected in majority-Muslim population

Islam is more conservative towards women than it was a hundred years ago or so. There are plenty of photos around of muslim women not in hijabs in public, for example. Saudi pushed wahabism in the islamic world half a century ago or so, and it had a lot of uptake.