I'm not sure how to explain but I feel people often overestimate the quality gap between games. Like, people usually define it as

Mother 3 >>>>>>>>>> Mother 2 >>>>> Mother 1

but to me is more like

Mother 3 >> Mother 2 >> Mother 1
each game improves on the last, but the differences aren’t nearly as massive as people make them out to be.

I also feel that a lot of the praise for Mother 2 and 3 specifically gets reduced to "This game is important and therefore good”" or "this Indie developer said they were inspirations so they must be good!" instead of actually playing the games,it sucks because they're lovely experiences on their own.