@uanj, I agree with the first 5 paragraphs of your post above, including the comments on elong's hotel offerings being better than ctrip's in many places (that is because a few years ago they gobbled up the resources and database of sinohotel.com which IMO was the best China-based domestic hotel booking agent of the time, and I used them copiously). Also Agoda, with whom I haven't had issues but find their prices aren't all that great once you add in their service fee...and they require prepayment and have unfavorable refund/cancellation policies. So they have slid down to a minor player for me, and rarely used by me for China.

On the last part of the post, from what I've been hearing, something has definitely changed on the hotel booking side. There are several different types of problems but the two most often mentioned are:
1) Reservations not completed. Specifically, sending confirmations for bookings, customer shows up at hotel and finds no booking was actually made with the hotel.
2) Price switching. Customers reserving hotel at offered price, ctrip emailing back that confirmation cannot complete at that price and offers a new higher price.

These situations can happen occasionally with any travel agent doing a large volume of business but the frequency of has (anecdotally) markedly increased in 2014 with ctrip, especially since April. Put together with some other information including comments made by ctrip reps to customers, and I'm willing to bet that much of the hotel booking operation has been subcontracted out to a third party as in:
A. Traveler/Customer --> B. Ctrip --> C. Hotel booking Agent --> D. Hotel Properties
It's Business Operations 101 to know that every time you add a link in the chain, it makes quality control of the customer experience more difficult to maintain at consistently high standard.

On the transport ticketing side, except for the annoying website functionality and slowness, I'm not seeing that many problems layable at ctrip's feet. I'm guessing they still handle air/rail bookings themselves---but then, the number of providers they have to deal with is a very limited group.