We really are past the golden age of animation, aren't we? And design especially.

They can throw all the flashy SAKUGA fireworks at anime but it won't have the fluidity and careful consideration of animation principles of older western animations. They can throw giant tits and fanservice and it still won't be as hot as some of the chicks like Chel were. We literally didn't know how good we had it.

And it's not just me being nostalgic or it being a case of "old good new bad". There's this viral picture of an article written by some dude who was giving a lecture of a modern US animation college and he was basically shocked and depressed to learn that NONE of the people knew or bothered to learn basics, human proportions or anything really. Even other lecturers. Everyone just wanted to jump straight into animating (which is why CalArts and other gay ass styles are so popular).

The reason games take so long is because there's now a ton of abstraction and things that used to be simple are now complex as fuck. Yes, we have better tools at making games but at the same time those tools use overheads and shit that makes certain things harder eg. GPU vendors like Nvidia and AMD literally close their hardware and you can only communicate with them using their APIs when you used to directly code shit on the console/PC etc.

Another thing is that there are ton of bottlenecks introduced in development:
>Execs figured out what "sells" so they now breathe down the devs necks instead of giving them freedom and want to micromanage shit.
>You have consulting companies (not only Sweet Baby, but also others related to other stuff) that will make you redo shit over and over.
>Industry is flooded now with hacks and people who want to make games but only did a basic bitch Unreal course or something.
>Every game that comes on a console needs to pass basically a checklist and an audit before it's allowed on the store.

Any many others. Some AAA games literally now take almost 10 years if not longer to make.