I personally think there is, but not for the reasons one would think.
We're absolutely facing a number of big problems - the ongoing campaign to strangle out little sites like ours, the impending competency crisis, the list goes on. Why I choose to remain positive is not because of any major progress we've made on any of these - it's based on the fact that the powers that be are fucking staggeringly incompetent, as are many of the forces that are against us. They are arrogant, stupid, short-sighted, ignorant, petty, and self-destructive, and those are arguably their better qualities.
You're on this website, so you know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about if you read this far into my post. Things may seem insurmountable now, and things will absolutely get worse before they get better. But there is room to hold on to optimism, even in these trying times - because our enemies are a cavalcade of fuck-ups.
Putting it different: if anyone here genuinely thought that we were as comprehensively fucked as the doomer/coomer brigade on A&H likes to make things out, they'd an hero already and cut out the fucking middleman. The logical reason they haven't done this is that they get off on everyone being as hopeless as they are and breathlessly congratulating themselves on how forward thinking they are every time something comes down the pipe that drives it home harder.
