Oh yeah, I forgot all about Skyfire's "friend"....I'm waiting with bated breath.
Current generation = 1980s and thereafter.
During the 1980s, the apologists who came on the scene shifted from simply playing defense to periodically playing offense, spurred on by a critic named Walter Martin who declared that the credentials of any person were to be regarded as fair game; they felt that if Martin and his followers were just fine with examining the credentials of non-"Christians," then Martin & co. should be willing to have their own credentials checked.
This led to a situation in the late 1980s and early 1990s where critics of the church started seeing their careers get hammered or even disappear once the skeletons started to emerge from the closets. The first to go down was a guy named D. J. Nelson, whose doctoral degree was found to be fake and who had been lying about his field work. Martin himself would later get caught in the backdraft, as it was discovered that his ordination to minister had actually been revoked back in the 19
50s after he ran afoul of his ordaining body.
The cottage industry that is criticizing the church briefly imploded during the early and middle 1990s as the herd was culled; several prominent figures went down in flames, while others were temporarily placed on the defensive for the first time in their careers.
This culminated in a report issued in 1997 by a pair of graduate students named Carl Mosser and Paul Owen. For their graduate work, they decided to survey a series of Mormon apologetical works and compare them to a series of critical works that were on the shelves at the time. Their conclusion was that since the 1980s, the average apologist was becoming increasingly sophisticated and had a greater likelihood of sporting a degree in a relevant field. In contrast, the average critic was actually
regressing in the amount of education and sophistication displayed; any research they did was often little more than leaning on a few previous critics, and what new material they did produce tended to be innuendo and invective instead of actual arguments. They concluded that at the present rate things were going, the critics of the church would ultimately crash and burn while the apologists would win the day.
Mosser & Owen got together with a few up-and-coming critics to publish a book of new arguments and material shortly thereafter, but the bulk of their arguments were rebutted by the end of the decade. It wouldn't be until a few years ago that any new critics emerged with what seemed like credible and potent arguments, but they've all started to go down in flames as well thanks to their falling into the same old patterns of behaviour.