Love the show but what irritates me the most...

It's not really sitcoms that suffer, but also scripted shows as well.

For example, the character of Richard Castle in ABC's "Castle" (2009 - 2016) went from being a highly intellectual best-selling novelist with a witty partner in crime to a complete buffoon that caved into Detective Kate Beckett's demands like a child as the series progressed.

As per your list (the ones I have seen):

• "Modern Family" (Claire and Phil) - I wanna say Phil was written idiotic from the start as far as I can recall.

• "Reba" (Cheyenne and Van) - Never watched the series, but I remember Reba McEntire's music from the 1990s. Quite a few of her songs had something to do with men being fools.

• "The Big Bang Theory" (Bernadette and Howard) - Just like you stated above: "...a glaring shrew of a woman who expects nothing but stupidity from her husband, and gets just that, usually because he's trying to side-step her moods and whims."

• "Two and a Half Men" (Judith and Alan -divorced, but you can still see it) - Alan was somewhat levelheaded during the first two seasons. For some odd reason, he became this whiny, pathetic shell of his former self later on.

• "The New Adventures of Old Christine" (Christine and Richard) - Another one I never bothered with, but shocking to hear seeing as how Julia Louis-Dreyfus was on "Seinfeld" (1989 - 1998) which contained an ensemble of well-balanced characters that were pretty much equals.

One more I'd like to add:

• "Roseanne" (Dan and Roseanne) - Always hated the fact that Dan came crawling back to Roseanne. Then again, perhaps this isn't the greatest example seeing as how he did stand up for himself on numerous occasions.

Not a new thing, nearly every sitcom since the early 90s has used the dumb, immature husband/smarter, bitchy wife formula. I think Home Improvement was when it started to get bad. Even in the 80s, Clair on The Cosby Show was a bitchy know it all who always thought she was right.

Don't forget The Simpsons, Homer being an absolute dummy.. not sure why the couples always rely on that formula. On King of Queens I find Carrie's character was a dick most of the time

This ranks right up there with the trope of a woman or young girl being able to fight and beat up a man that outweighs her by 100-200 pounds. The first time something like these tropes appeared in media, I'm sure it was funny or different or interesting because it was against type, but after a million times it's just lame and stupid not to mention lazy writing.

The idiot, or incompetent, or whipped husband is a sitcom tradition that goes back over ninety years on radio. It continued on television starting in the late 1940s. It will be with us forever.

It is made this way to appeal to female viewers, as they make up the majority of the viewerbase for these kinds of shows. Women love to see men being portrayed as intellectually inferior to them.