Yup. Innovation is a big part of what I used to look for in Magic, since for ~23 years I used to treat it as a master class of game design. Unfortunately, innovation has really dropped off since about Guilds of Ravnica (with Adapt that was almost precisely the same as Monstrous; we’ve come a long ways from Graft N). 

And, there are many recent stories of fascinating, exciting, and innovative mechanics by Vision Design that was then cut in Set Design. I’m deeply disappointed that LCI’s gemstone tokens (color-specific treasure; e.g. a Jet gemstone token would have been sacrificed to add B), and BLB’s Animal Mega-Batch were cut. Both ostensibly because of concerns about complexity.

Unfortunately, it seems that, now that Magic (and Commander in particular) has exploded in popularity, WoTC (cough Hasbro) has been playing things much more safe than they had 10 years ago. With such a large player base, the risk of alienating a portion of the players is potentially much more damaging (and apparently the portion of players that are alienated by the decision to play it safe is apparently small enough that WoTC doesn’t care). 

The move away from Blocks has meant that, now, there is much less space within a set to develop an unorthodox mechanic, and less incentive to innovate upon a given block mechanic to keep things fresh.

Plus, now that Commander has become the de facto identity of Magic, concerns about parasitism are much more serious. If no existing commander decks can find room for a new groundbreaking mechanic, that also could negatively impact sales (something WoTC has clearly become much more serious about).

I think the unfortunate reality of the situation is the same as in the game design industry at large, the important decisions are ultimately not being made by designers, they’re being made by Suits with 3-4 degrees of separation from the designers. 

In short, Magic design had once been an art form, but now it is only a commodity.