Since Delia Derbyshire‘s initial treatment of the title theme, each version has gotten slightly worse. It’s what happens when a creative experiment is successful, I suppose: rather than learning from it to do more creative experiments (which are often unsuccessful, after all), subsequent creators often just kind of polish up the remaining artifact to try to retain what success it had.
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I’m not quite there with your summation — for me, it’s not so clean as a linear degradation over time. I love the ethereality of the first theme, and I actually kinda like the Rock & Roll Doctor vibe that went with doctors #4 and #5 (“my first doctor” bias plays in there too).
Past that, though, and up until the relaunch, they’re really quite bad, for me.
That said I’m actually pretty fond of all of the relaunch takes on the theme, as they seem to have found a solid synthesis of the various previous incarnations (weird and alien + rock’n'roll + symphonic).
In terms of the visual design, I’m absolutely NUTS for the latest incarnation, though I’ve liked many of them … and hoo boy, am I ever glad they ditched the awkward head shots after a while. I think doctor #2 is really the only one that kind of worked for me.