Fischer was a champion in the pre-computer era, though not having a team of seconds to help with opening preparation and analysis might have contributed to his leaving the chess world, one can only imagine the amount of dedication and time it must take to be a lone player doing all the work. Working with computers must have attributed at least a little of Kasparov's stay at the top. Being able to search millions of games on a hard drive is certainly easier than looking through hundreds of periodicals.
With each generation of players new technologies and innovations in the game are found, thus changing the way the game is played at the top levels. The 19th and 20th centuries saw a few different eras of chess, Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodernism, New Dynamism, and then in the late 20th century you have computers to add into the mix. Where chess goes from here who knows, there are some that believe that chess is on the verge of being solvable, like checkers where every game should be a draw if played perfectly. The one thing that must be remembered is a very high percentage, 99%+, of us chess players will never have the time nor the mental capacity to reach even the master levels of the game, so why should we worry about chess being solved when we still have this journey of learning the game in front of us.
I was very intrigued at the "Fischer: overrated" post as I am new to chess.com and chess in general and have only recently been looking at chess's history and its famous players. I thought it very interesting how we figure out a way to talk about the "greatest" player, because after all playing chess is about "matching wits" or going against another person, and that would eventually lead to the question of who the best of the best is.
The Fischer post to me got interesting when people talked about how players devoted their lives to chess and how long one could maintain a strong standing in it. What I also got from this is that Fischer was all alone and figuring out chess himself. And that others had groups of people working with them.
It's also interesting to see that Fischer eventually promoted something called Chess960 which is meant to combat the opening moves memorization a lot of people are doing. Another great player, Kasparov, has promoted Advanced Chess in which a player and computer go against another player and computer. They're both going to two extremes to address the issue of computers and chess.
Now I know this is a long stretch, because there are many factors that affects one's health. But do you think Fischer... was not wanting or able to handle being at the top because he had turned away from rote memorization of opening moves (and computers) and that Kasparov had been able to stay on the top so long... because he has accepted computers and tried to work with them?
Sorry, just wanted to mention this... I don't know if it's been discussed before.