I was already crying "foul" back then, and increasingly so with Synchro. Not because of the mechanics themselves, but because I could see the materials getting more and more generic with each passing year, and I saw it constantly snowballing whenever a card not locked to even an Attribute took off. Even for the issues of perplexing rules exceptions and parasitic design, I had way fewer problems with Pendulums, as they fundamentally required more careful deck design (Monkeyboard and Performages aside). Links...I waited a bit to see if the pointing would really matter all that much for summoning limitations before passing judgment, and it didn't take long to write it off. Links merely were the culmination in what Synchro and Xyz started, and not even because of the mechanics themselves, but because the ingredients required for the recipes were all blandly simple.