I also find myself missing some of those great old nodes. To me there's something more noteworthy about a node which gets 50 votes when the norm is 2 than one which gets 500 votes when the norm is 490.

One way to deal with rep inflation might be to order best nodes of all time based upon the percent by which they outperform their daily norm rather than the total number of votes the post gets. This could either replace the existing best nodes of all time or be another way of counting, much like Saints in Our Book has two versions: the old (which doesn't appear to be updated) number of writeups measurement; and the new, amount of exp measurement.