Columbo - You might better sleuth better (and change your moniker), here is Carlsen's affirmation of his play being like Karpov's (he says agrees with Kasparov's assessment):

Chessbase Translation of ChessPro Interview - http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7778

"From some things he [Kasparov] said I realised that my approach is largely associated for him with the way Karpov took decisions. He knew him like no-one else – I can’t say it was unpleasant for me to hear such an assessment…"

Speaking of myopic, you should note that you bring up the losses against Anand and Kramnik, not me.
I just point out the fact that you need to beat players in order to dominate them. Drawing or losing is not enough.

The last 15 years Gelfand has 0 wins against Topalov (as against Anand, Kramnik and Kasparov) so calling those stats "not that bad" is to be kind towards Gelfand even if I haven't bothered counting the exact number of losses against those four strongest players of 1997-2012. Topalov was far from as strong before 2005 as after that, so 0 wins in 15 years against a player Carlsen scored 7 wins against in less than 5 (stronger) years is at least not one of Gelfand's bigger claims to fame.

Even if your guesses were anywhere near truth, your notion of "best" would still mean best in some carefully selected subset of chess position. That is not chess, and nobody has been claiming that the players in these lists here are the best players of checkers, rendju, pokemon or some other such game.

If you would analyse the games of today top 15 compared with the top 15 of before 2000 then you would see a difference in number of mistakes. Any topcomputerprogram would indicate that if you do the trouble to investigate 100 of games as I did when following up theory.
To state that Anand, Kramnik,... are less motivated today is ridiculous. Nobody becomes and stays worldchampion if he isn't 200% motivated. Kramnik is still extremely motivated as he himself stated in recent interviews and his last game in Dortmund where he went for broke to get back over 2800 points (and eventually lost) is a clear proof of that. They are still working many hours per day on chess and you don't do that if you aren't fully motivated.
Beating Englishmen isn't a small thing to do. Short, Adams, Howell and Mc Shane are extremely strong players and scoring 4/4 even for a 2800 player is really exceptional. I find it even more surprising that Kramnik could find the necessary motivation so easily back after the rather weak performance in the Tal Memorial. Amber isn't a serious tournament. It is for most topplayers a well paid holiday in the south of France (which won't be prolonged anymore).

You completly ignore the transformation Anand has made last years. Switching to 1.d4 isn't a small thing to do. Also his matchpreparations were completely different from his first match with Kasparov. In that match he naively still thought that the one who is finding the chesstruth is becoming the worldchampion. In a recent interview he mentioned that it is not about being right or wrong on the board but being a step ahead which can be achieved by continuous alternating lines and openings. This is a major development which he made only after 2000!

Kasparov (around year 2000) was beating inexperienced young and weaker players having no serious helpers (except the match in 2000 which turned out a disaster for Kasparov). Computers at that time were still ridiculous weak. Today I redo all computeranalysis older than 2007 as there are simply too many holes in it (indicated by Rybka, Fritz, Houdini,..). In 2000 the help of the computers was still very limited while Kasparov possessed several strong secondants and was able to use his gigantic wc-match preparations (read the books Kasparov-Karpov where he many times mentions which lines he used later against Anand, Topalov, Kramnik,...). The young generation around 2000 was playing with a big handicap against Kasparov while today this isn't the case anymore. Secondants are today less and less used and replaced by Houdini, Rybka,...

The game has evolved and the old topplayers too or have been replaced by young players.