I see some aspects of this, but I've experienced the opposite effect. The open rules of B/X and 1/2E required the players to trust the DM. Otherwise you'd get the DM vs. player problem. 3E came along and seemed to whisper malevolently at the players "don't trust the DM, he's cheating!" And players started to develop this sense that everything the DM did must be accomplished through the rules as written. They lost trust in the DM and started looking for trsut in the rules. YMMV of course.
You've got it mostly right. For me, the lack of trust in the DM came way before 3e was announced. A couple of years of playing 2e showed me that DMs were not to be trusted.
At first it was easy to trust the DM. He told me what things happened and I trusted them to be right. Then I played in a group with 13 different players(who showed up randomly for games) most of which were also DMs. We started up a list of all the games we were playing(which, including non-D&D games amounted to nearly 30 games) and voted every week to see which one we'd play. Our average session length was 14 hours(in which we'd probably play 3 different D&D games since we'd vote again when we got bored) and then we started up 5 or 6 other D&D games during the week to keep us occupied between sessions.
It was because of that many different DMs and that much gaming that I realized that there was no consistency. One DM would say there was no buying of magic items in his game while another one gave free ones out every session. If you wanted to grab an enemy, one DM would make it an attack roll, another one would make it a dex check, another one would tell you it wasn't possible, another would make it a strength check with a penalty made up by him on the spot, and another one would make it a dex check but if you failed you were likely to take enough damage to kill you.
I was smart enough to do the math and realized that you needed to start gaming the DMs. Bob might not like grappling, so you didn't use it in his game because he's make it hard for you. James might believe that fire spreads at great speeds, so if you set anything on fire in his game, you could expect that before you had time to leave, the entire building you were in would be down on you. Sara might really like spellcasters and be willing to allow nearly any interesting plan you could come up with for a spell. So using a magic missile to cause an entire building to fall on an enemy killing them instantly would work in that game and was a better idea than using a fireball.
And that was just the DMs personality differences. That wasn't even counting the differences in their rules knowledge and their abilities to just make mistakes. One of our DMs didn't know that the enhancement bonus of weapons applied to both to hit and damage back in 2e. A player once bet her that was the rule and if he was right, he was allowed to get any magic item he wanted. He ended up with something stupidly powerful out of that bet.
So, yeah, I learned not to trust DMs. When all the articles came out introducing 3e they had a similar theme: We are going to have rules for all of those small things that didn't have rules for them in 2e. You won't have to make up rules for grappling, we'll give those to you. You won't have to decide exactly what effect that "cloud of acid gas" has on walls or doors, we'll have rules for that. My thought was "FINALLY! Now when I play 3 different games I won't have to remember 3 entirely different sets of rules."
