I wrote for them from 1990 to the end of 2000 (mostly freelance, only the last 30 months onstaff), and it was sad watching how uninteresting the process became during that time.
All the pics in the mag being of people at workstations really hurt the visual part of the mag, and writing about software shaders was nowhere near as fun as doing it about foreground miniatures and somebody dragging nail polish across the the gate of an optical printer to create an interesting variation in thruster exhaust animation.
Ding! Ding! Ding!! You win!! That's EXACTLY why I quit reading it.
In the early issues, it was interesting to hear how they made those visuals -- as you say, using miniatures and all kinds of improvised techniques in the studio. Things like shining a laser at a rotating crystal to make the photon torpedoes (or something like that)...that made for interesting reading!
CGI is boring (to read about -- unless your trying to learn some software to perform a specific task). It's basically the same techniques over and over (more or less) or some new proprietary software for this or that. I guess that's interesting the first time you read it...but it's not the same as the old days.
Wow...you wrote for Cinefex? Cool. It was (and probably still is) the best magazine out there on the subject of visual effects.