I am an amateur extra class licensee.
I took the extra exam this morning, and passed with 94%. This license class used to require passing a 20 words-per-minute Morse code test, sending and receiving. Although I love CW, I was resigned to never achieving 20 wpm. I did try the extra test back in the 70's but you had to pass the Morse portion before you could take the written portion, and I couldn't get past the code test.
So that's where it stood for almost 30 years. I had not been paying that much attention to what was going on with amateur radio licensing until the last couple of months, when I noticed my license was about to expire and decided I wanted to become active again. Surprisingly (to me, at least) the code requirement for general and extra classes is now only 5 wpm. That explains why nearly all licensees are either Technician (no code requirement) or Extra class. If you can't do Morse code at all, and are happy to talk on 2-meter FM, you do the technician class. If you can do a little Morse code, and are fairly well prepared in the technical area (radio theory, electronics, etc.), you can do General or Extra.
So now I have passed the Extra class test (sometimes disparagingly referred to as "Extra Lite"), and can go chase the exotic stations that only hang out in the bottom 25 KHz of the bands.