I became a fan in 2008 and a year later became a die-hard who watches dozens of live performances on YouTube daily. So the general notion of Jon's decline was very obvious as the very first live performance I saw from them was Livin' On A Prayer from The Crush Tour DVD. I was shocked to see Jon not singing the chorus and that they were shamelessly using the playback for those parts (what kind of a rock band does that, seriously???).

However as my knowledge kept increasing in 2009, the initial dissapointment about Jon's decline was quickly replaced by optimism from his improvement in 2008. You can see how he was back singing songs he couldn't do in 2003-2006. Then, the MSG '08 DVD was released, which wasn't perfect from a vocal standpoint, but was still very satisfactory with Jon doing a very decent job on Always, Dry County, Blood On Blood, Living In Sin, etc.