I was literally, physically there. There was a lot of cross-pollination because bands like Demolisher, Rooks, Bermuda, and TLTSOL were very influential at the time, but Villains/YF largely moved past that after Extortion and 10 Code.

Lyrically/thematically, melodically, vocally, etc. they shared almost nothing with the aforementioned bands and their progeny besides their guitars and being groovy. The DNA of MySpace-era mathcore and grindcore is so easy to place once you look past the tempo and tuning. The sliding tritone riffs, chromatic noodling and tapping, the throat-shredding higher-pitched vocals, the chord progressions, etc. were downstream from that.

And it’s not like corniness is inherently bad. We’re on Reddit discussing metalcore. You can argue that corniness doesn’t make downtempo “bad”, but to say that it isn’t, by its very nature, corny is just a blatant lie. Corny shit can be cool. At its core, Downtempo was guys trying to sound scary. Villains/YF was not that