I have been playing shadowrun on and off since it was released way to long ago. I had not played in a few years and decided to start back again. Something I never really noticed till now was how all the source/rule books have seemed to change. They went from alot of pictures and flavor text....to more of encylopidia. I never really noticed till now because I had tons of books from the earlier releases. I mean I really miss the half/full page for each contact. The full page each gun got in Street Sammy catalog. Oh why does everygame seem to be better as you remebered it then now.

This has been discussed in depth before. A decision was made when SR3 came out that the Core Rule books would cram all previous material in them and stick to the rules side of things leaving the sourcebooks for background and in character stuff. This wasn't strictly a production decision either the fluff in character text takes up a lot of wordcount and the amount of material that went into M&M, Cannon Companion, MitS, Matrix and Rigger 3, precluded the use of a lot of art because of space restrictions (note that those books + the corebook crammed the rules equivalent of 10+ previous edition books and still added new stuff).

Of course if FASA/FanPro had decided to go the other way we'd have people complaining they have to buy all the ten books again for the SR3 updates...

If you want atmosphere and background both the rules update/upgrade book "SOTA" and the recent lifestyle book "SSG" are probably what you're looking for.