Maybe. From what I remembered, the first three PAXEast (2010-2012, I didn't go last year), the panel selection always felt like a nice mix of community, media, game promo, and industry talk (the first two year had talks sponsored by the IGDA, typically for folks who are getting their feet wet for GDC talk experience), almost all of those are gone now, and some of the other ones just felt weak this year. I'm shocked at the OCRemix one as you described, because I remember the one I went to at Prime, and that one was fantastic.
Lines were always like this before, I recall my previous experiences like waiting 2 hours for Portal 2 or L4D2, or even Red Dead. It's just that if you aren't into MOBAs this year, you really didn't have much variety left to look at as far as new game content that wasn't released. If you ignore MOBA/WoW based stuff, off the top of my head, the following aren't publicily accessible:
Evolve
Wolfenstein
Trials (but that's out this week)
The Crew
Child of Light
Even Project Spark is in open beta, but I think that was an ok one to try only to have someone walk you through it.