Not really the point of this post or anything, but I can't help myself when it comes to this topic. Basically everyone immediately lived better after they were no longer under the Roman thumb. The vast majority of people in the Roman empire were rural laborers whose surplus was expropriated by the cities and who got nothing in return. The less powerful and less centralized successor states extracted less from the rural population. The idea that the collapse of Rome was in any way at all a tragedy (or that there was really a "collapse" at all - there was more of a very gradual transition) is basically a reactionary myth.