Why are CD's decling in quality?


When CD came out in the 80's , they were marketed as 'indestructible'. They were built in such a way that they were almost impervious to any scratches and other damage.
As time went on, they declined in quality to the point that you could buy a cd and find it skipped on the first playing. Now many CD's I buy in the 21st Century seem to be incredibly vulnerable to damage. This is very frustrating.
.Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts on this topic?
Or knowledge of why this has come about
acidfolk
KAcz HEvac, etc

I think it is in the quality of materials and manufacture,
after all in the 80 s the discs were made thicker, the ones I have from then still work fine. It's not my environment, which is a normal home one for them
However, newer ones and it seems to me the newer the worse they are , do skip and as you say they have become like vinyl records. Which were horrible in that regard.
The selling of cds in the 80's focused on people' s frustration with LP's , the scratch and the skipping, were so common and difficult to counter act the effects of, since the CD was supposed to eliminate all that , CD's took off in popularity, that is one reason anyway.
The manufacturers at the time , applied reason to their actions and made the discs of higher quality, That is my opinion anyway based on experience.
Now they have us, Or did till ipods took over, they started making discs poorly , either because they assumed we would just run out and buy a new one, or due to prices dropping for CD's, especially once people could make their own discs at home. Cd prices fell.
this really bugs, me. I order new CD's and then have the great displeasure of having to skip over tracks just to hear part of the album! And, I feel taken advantage off, since they roped me in with CD;s that did not skip and scratch.
Perhaps, it's in the type or quality of the plastic they use. Otherwise , why do Japanese discs work and sound much better at twice the price of our CD's?
Polycarbonate has always been used for the clear layer in CDs so newer CDs should not be more liable to wear and tear than older CDs.
Courtesy Wikipedia:

"Many early LDs were not manufactured properly; sometimes a substandard adhesive was used to sandwich together the two sides of the disc.[citation needed] The adhesive contained impurities that were able to penetrate the lacquer seal layer and chemically attack the metalized reflective aluminium layer, causing it to oxidize and lose its reflective characteristics. This was a problem that was termed "laser rot" among LD enthusiasts, also called "color flash" internally by LaserDisc-pressing plants. Some forms of laser rot could appear as black spots that looked like mold or burned plastic which cause the disc to skip and the movie to exhibit excessive speckling noise. But, for the most part, rotted discs could actually appear perfectly fine to the naked eye.

Later optical standards have been known to suffer similar problems, including a notorious batch of defective CDs manufactured by Philips-DuPont Optical at their Blackburn, Lancashire facility in England during the late 1980s/early 1990s."
Personally, I have not found CDs declining in quality. I've always felt they were delicate from the very beginning and try to handle them carefully (at least the same as LPs). The hype about them being tough is just that. I'm not exactly sure what the OP is getting at.

As far as sound quality, I think we're finally getting someplace with some of the best sounding CDs coming out recently.