Spit 16 replacing the spit 9 and the old super-spit 5, did not have a big effect.
Well,in may chart above these specific transits are not visible, as they happened quite a time before 2008 (16 was introduced in 2005).
I chose to omit the early days, as not only EW & MW arenas were included in the stats in 06/07, but also some of the planes had been markedly differently performance. Most notably the Spit V, which wasn't anything like the Spit V we have today, and thus was
vastly more popular. Combined with having much fewer fighter planes overall, it makes a true comparison much more difficult. "Look, in 2002 there were much more EW planes" is rather pointless when the most used 'EW plane' of that time had kind of LW performance back then
P47M drivers were probably in D40 or P51s before that.
I very much guess so, yes.