Hard to say.
On one hand I remember early 3D games (Saturn, PS1, N64) all feeling like a big step backward from the SNES. Going from Super Mario World to Mario 64 or from Street Fighter II to Tekken didn't just feel like diminishing returns, it felt like backsliding.
Since then been impressed as 3D polygons have made huge strides from PS1-PS2-PS3-PS4 jumps.
Now, part of what you seem to be touching on is trade off for graphical fidelity and the big one as a JRPG fan is the loss of fully rendered worlds with towns and over world maps. On SNES for example just expected a town of people to talk to and then leave to over world and walk to next town. Now, often teleport to towns via a menu and towns are often just menus as well. I get how much harder it is to model everything, but part of me misses that sense of world building walking around everywhere brought me.
