It doesn’t mean that people have “awful taste or only learns about the industry from media outlets” if they don’t like games that you like. It’s literally the same if I give you food you don’t like but I do like. I can’t say that you have an awful taste.
However, if we dont argue about matters of taste, then what will we argue about?
I think I have never played the first one, but the second one I have when I was kid in 1990’s. I remember that the gameplay felt bad but still me and my brother played it quite a lot.
Did you read the article? The point here is that nowadays games in general, especially AAA games, takes very long to develop. In my opinion one reason for that is that games have became way too big, usually at the expense of gameplay. Of course there is some series like NBA 2K and CoD that keeps releasing a “new” game every year. However we all know that for many years they have repeated themselves a lot. New releases should be just patches that updates the roster or something like that.
That is true.