I saw him late-autumn 2005, I believe, in a nice venue downtown, the Auditorium Theatre. Certainly his older songs were very accelerated – Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, for instance, which is one of my absolute favorites, was virtually unrecognizable until about a minute into his performance of it – but I attributed this fact as much to (a) his being bored with performing his 1960s/1970s tracks in "standard studio style," having performed them thousands of times at this point, and (b) his lacking the vocal range he used to have and which his older tunes necessitated, than to any designed short-shrift on his part. Meanwhile, when he played a couple tracks from Love and Theft, the current state of his voice lent itself to much more straight-up interpretations of his studio work.
It also seems a bit rich to judge the career of a 72-year-old man based on his live-performances in the last ten or twenty years (and obviously you're not guilty of this, but others seem to be). I once watched Stephen Stills and David Crosby sweat and heave their way through a three-hour concert with Graham Nash (who's in relatively much better health), but I'm certainly not going to judge the career of Crosby, Stills, & Nash (or Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, for that matter) based on that data-point. Moreover: Dylan's copious live-albums and filmed performances from the 1960s and 1970s are testaments to his skills and merits as a performer (without even mentioning his compositional genius).
