There were plenty of issues with the -400 for the first few years, and it was based on an old design. Of late there's been a bit of a run of unusual things, but it's simply been made more noticeable by the reduced time on the ground. Issues in the past would be fixed without causing delays, but that's harder with short slips.
I can't really say about other operators, but some of the contract engineers, who do see other airlines tech logs, have said that ours are still reasonably free of MELs in comparison.
The items I see in the tech log aren't all that different to what we'd see in the -400 (and 767 for that matter). I've just completed 4 sectors, and the worst aircraft had 4 MELs, and a couple had none. We didn't add anything to the log on any of the sectors.