I'd like to also point out that a lot of conceptual discussions about this are fairly academic. We had a sideline ref on our recent EA2 game which called an illegal throw in when both the player's feet were obviously touching the line (he called it inside the field); clearly wrong, and the ref was looking clearly at it, he was just completely ignorant of the actual (simple) rule discussed above. I've seen the same for other throw-in violations such as I mentioned, but the point is the same: the refs, even for the "letter leagues", are often shockingly ignorant of the rules, in addition to being pretty lazy in general. We also have had many blatantly incorrect offside calls, where the AR was just too lazy/rotund to even walk the line, and just guessed after the offensive player received the ball (often very incorrectly, as it turns out, when reviewing video).
The point is just that many of the refs are shockingly ignorant and bad, and it doesn't really matter what league you're playing in, or age group, or anything else. And they are not going to get better, since there's no effective way to report bad officiating and/or get bad refs assigned less (or trained more). The quality of officiating you get game-to-game is pretty random. You can yell at bad refs for being bad, or accept it in silence, or whatever; nothing is going to really impact the quality of officiating, until or unless your player gets good enough to play in the top leagues, where there presumably is some accountability for at least knowing the rules.
My theory is that as parents get older, the refs don't get better, but parents get more accepting of the general crappy quality of officiating, and lower their expectations accordingly. I'm pretty much in the "just let the kids play now, nobody here is ever going pro" camp now.