Dude. We had a friend on holiday in northern Germany who wanted to visit us in Maastricht. Even though she was in fucking Germany, it was twice as fast to get to the border, take a bus to Groningen and then cross the Netherlands than to use the DB to Aachen.

Another thing. The Dutch trains that are known to have many transfer passengers stop on the same platform, so you only need to cross the platform. In Germany your train arrives on Gleis 5, your next train on Gleis 16. Oh no, 13. Woops we changed it again haha.

You are right it went downhill, but DB is on another level of skullfuckery.

As a fellow dutch person that also travels by trains a lot, I get really irritated when people only complain. Sure, there are definitely fuck ups at NS. But I feel people completely write off the system because of them. I can't remember the last time a train got outright cancelled (outside of extreme weather conditions in which I also wouldn't be comfortable driving). There are issues with the system, those should be fixed, but that does not mean that everything is terrible.

But maybe it's way worse in your part of the country, there definitely have been issues with getting enough personnel (as do all other sectors). So maybe we are both making our arguments from two different experiences.