It surely has become something different, including the pagan/occult elements of which you speak, which I find very unappetizing. I agree that most people have no idea what it is about. They think it's about costumes and candy, just as they mistake the true or original meaning of many other holidays.
My all time pet peeve is to hear someone call Thanksgiving "Turkey Day",-- as though it's just a day to eat a lot of turkey and pie; when it is actually a very sacred day: a day for Americans to give humble and heartfelt thanks to God for all the good we have, and all the good this great nation is.
Food for thought...
From Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan:
Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness. Chap xlvii. Of the Benefit that proceedeth from such Darkness...
[21] For from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretense of successsion to St. Peter, their whole hiearchy (or kingdom of darkness) may be compared to the kingdom of fairies (that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits and the feats they play in the night). And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily percieve that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen empire.
[23] The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.