Did emergence of the modern party system cause the decline in Presidential quality after Jackson?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Part of it is the office itself being limited in scope and power compared with today. Presidents of the preceding period were famous for non-Presidential things. Jefferson gets bumped up for things that occurred way before he was President. This is arguably true for all of them through Jackson in some form or another. Quincy Adams made a name for himself in diplomacy, Jackson on the battlefield.

Many of the Presidents afterwards just didn't have that kind of pre-Presidential grandeur, even the Generals and two of them died early in their Presidencies. This feeds into the notion that men of smaller stature figuratively speaking, would sort of shrink in the office.