Scout has gotten better. There are a number of cards that combo to give you better performance out of scout, for instance NV/scout has a good bit of positive synergy as you can know what you are matting and can use NV for psuedo-trashing on a board that lacks other trashing. Likewise, scout was improved by tunnel - yes scout doesn't directly get you the gold, but it increases the search space for tunnels for cards like cellar, secret chamber, tactician, vault, hamlet, horse traders, young witch, oasis, etc. On top of this scrying pool, forge, and arguably all the diversity cards in cornucopia have made scout better.
The problem is, that this increase in utility has occurred with all the cards. Pearl diver benefits more from having some new "weak" 2's come out - like herbalist and duchess - while scout has slipped further down the 4 rankings. We need more "weak" 4s to make scout look better.
I'd also add that dominion has seen several general thematic pushes that favored cantrips heavily - prosperity brought us a lot of things that like long, expensive games so engine building became much more accessible and even crazy things like TR/PD for a pseudo-village became viable. Cornucopia rewards diversity so cantrips that increase diversity, but not effective deck size, are greatly rewarded. This has started to swing back with hinterlands - traders is much bigger than watchtower for wanting it in your hand during other player's turns' missing the curse with watchtower sucks, but you may be able to trash it anyways later - you never get a second shot a free silver. Tunnel likewise is a bit anti-cantrip (though only on boards with discarding attacks). It wouldn't surprise me if another expansion of dominion continued making cantrips less automatic buys and rewarded dynamic use of victory cards or something. I mean suppose we get an attack card called White Elephant - "Each other player trashes a treasure from hand and gains an estate." Scout suddenly becomes a direct counter and is arguably stronger than xroads here. Or something along the way of "discard a victory card. If you did, then do X".
There are a lot of ways scout could be improved by game dynamics and rejigger the card rankings. I don't expect it to happen, but I also wouldn't write it off.