Clearly the others were never meant to be such normal people. For instance, the portrayals of Ethan were totally fudged in the most obviously pathetic way possible. I'm supposed to now believe that he was just some technician who was working on pregnancy issues, but before he was a creepy silent dude who only talked when he needed to completely fool people or level creepy, violent threats at people. He was able to easily carry a pregnant woman around the jungle under one arm while dragging an unconscious Charlie around under his other arm. He then proceeded to hang Charlie from a tree and beat the living snot out of Jack while still carrying a pregnant woman around the jungle. Then, to top it all off, he has the killer bolas skills of a feral jungle man in rags. The new version of Ethan was a total fudge on the part of the writers simply because they didn't like their older ideas for some unknown reason. I'm guessing that during the course of writing the show they decided that they wanted "the others" to be something else entirely in light of some, huge, plot change and decided to explain away their previous version of the others as if it were all a trick. Unfortunately their explanations were really lame in comparison to what I saw.
The writers also seem to have started off with a more mystical island, but then decided to take the show down another path and hence we get a stupid explanation for the otherworldly whispers that Sayid heard. I'm almost certain they made their biggest change in this regard between season one and season two. Their cleanup job has been too clumsy. Even the "hatch" was originally portrayed as something very different from what was ultimately revealed. I can't wait to find out how they'll explain away the smoke monsters if I'm correct about all of this semi-retconning.
The part of me that wants to think the show is still perfect wants to believe that the writers are simply trying to trick us with fake explanations for things that are, in actuality, really cool in some way, but I'm definitely having trouble keeping that hope alive as the show "reveals" more. (I put "reveals" in quotes because I don't think they can "reveal" something they didn't have in mind from the start.)