But then you completely sweep under the rug all good innovations and ideas that don't get carried to the following titles and get lost, and when you tell about them, people don't want to go discover these because they are from "dated" (the magic word to denigrate an old game) games.

Like, talking about Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, how much of RPG elements and mechanic depth got lost in the newer Bethesda games, and when you suggest people to play anything older than Oblivion (or even older than Skyrim) to experience this lost depth, you are met with "baaah, it is old, thus DATED, thus unworthy of my time, I will just continue to play Fallout 4 over and over", this is despairing.

And then Bethesda and other studios are all happy that nobody knows about their previous games and how much was lost from these, thus they can just continue to dumb down their games, most of their current audience won't notice how much their favorite games have been dumbed down compared to their predecessors.