Of course there has been no "Golden Age of the Fourth Amendment" in US history, and the relative reliability of exclusionary rules relative to illegal searches and such doctrines as "fruit of the poisonous tree" versus "independent discovery" have waxed and waned in different contexts.
What comes into competition in what is your apparent point are concepts of "where there is a right, there is a remedy" versus "de minimus non curat lex", or in English, "no harm, no foul." The presence of words in the Comstitution does not by itself prevent the government from doing anything. If you are denied a right to speak, assemble or practice your religion, or if your property was taken without compensation, then you can get civil damages or some appropriate form of injunctive or declaratory relief from infringement of your rights.
Except in the context of things like the "cops tear up wrong address on warrant" or the recent story of damages awarded in the "roadside strip search" you don't see a whole lot of suits over a "Fourth Amendment violation" standing alone. The normal protection of your fourth amendment rights is in the state being penalized by not being able to use improperly obtained evidence, or certain derivative fruits of an improper search, to seek your conviction for some crime. So, where you end up is with the question of "if I've been illegally searched and nothing happened then what is the remedy?" Your question is a rhetorical response to the effect of "in what way were you harmed?"
Some of the screaming is a conflict between a view which holds that a violation of a right is per se wrong - I think there was a comedian who used to say that burglars broke into his house, took everything, and replaced all of his stuff with exact duplicates. Some folks will say, yes, that's a burglary, but others will say that even if it was a burglary, you haven't suffered the consequences of loss which is WHY we have a law against burglary.
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