What worse for franchise: tiny upgrade, deviation, dumb down, "inbreeding"?

[MaxwellGT2000]

KylieDog said:

A dumbed down deviation that isn't a side/spin-off game.  Like RE4.

Sounds exactly like the transition to RE5 from RE4 to me, streamlining the invitory, making a non co-op series co-op, taking out any and all scare moments to make action scenes that are on rails shooting people on motorcycles... hrm... 

As for the OP topic, I feel inbreeding is one of the worst things, making things far too complex isn't fun for the core consumer nor the general consumer, very rarely is it done right anyway, Monster Hunter Tri is the best in the series, still very complex but things are far more intuitive.  

I guess that's probably the thing designers overlook, people don't want more complex, nor dumbed down, they want fun and intuitive, simplistic things are often intuitive, simplistic things aren't always fun, IE platformers are pretty simplistic, not all are fun cause the level and control design has to be very well done, which is a complex process.  World of Warcraft is complex, how to get into it however is actually simple and intuitive, it's just designed very well.  

So basically all are pretty bad for a series, if a designer truly wants to improve the series they should make things more intuitive while retaining the level design, controls, AI, etc that made the game fun in the first place.