What age people are you talking about? I can only speak for around here (Boston) and the parishes I've known, but I don't think many people much under 60 had the "Catechism stuffed down their throats" as children.
I'm outside of Washington DC. I'm thinking about people my daughter's age, her friends and classmates in their early twenties, up to my age (mid-fifties). They were just forced to go to religious education classes when they didn't want to, and what kid does want to? I never went through these catechizing classes so I don't know what they consisted of.
My RCIA classes were absolutely fantastic, taught be some very brilliant women and our great priest, who's a lawyer, but I've heard repeatedly from longtime Catholics that our classes are uniquely wonderful.
Maybe I should have been more precise! ;-)
When I was in grammar school in the 50s, we used the Baltimore Catechism (I for grades 1-3 and II for grades 4-8). It was a catechism in the strict sense of the word -- questions and answers. We had to memorize it. (memorization has gone out of style, but we had to do a lot of it, and not only in religion!) It covered pretty much all the basics. What I liked about it was that it gave the proper terminology with a glossary of "hard" terms at the end of each chapter.
In the 70s, I was asked to teach Sunday School, and I did for a couple of years. The first year, I taught 4th grade (preparation for First Penance by then -- we did First Confession the day before First Communion, second grade); the books were a lot fancier than the old Baltimore Catechism -- glossy paper and lots of color pictures, but virtually content-free. I pretty much ignored them and just taught.
The next year I was assigned 8th grade. Same thing -- except the books were so bad, I went downtown to a Catholic bookstore and bought a dozen copies of an alternative that at least had some content related to Catholic doctrine. The books assigned had, for example, a chapter on mysticism(!! for kids who knew none of the basics) which -- for reasons still unclear to me -- did not mention even one Catholic mystic. There was another whole chapter on why it's better to do things in groups than alone, which I found -- and find -- totally bizarre.
From what I know from my younger sisters' experience, it was in the late 60s that there was a rapid transition from actual Catholic doctrine to "trendy"!
I'm at St. Thomas Aquinas in Charlottesville and our RCIA classes are sound and detailed. But I've been part of a class taught by a deacon and it was downright heretical.
Catechesis of the young is a job everyone wants somebody else to do. It doesn't get thought about, monitored, improved, the way other aspects of parish life do. It's frustrating.