I'm perfectly happy with Mario being used as a protagonist in every single Nintendo game, I love their focus on gameplay and not having to waste months of that dev time on creating a new human shape to be my avatar is another month going into the games development to make what matters better.
Sure sometimes it turns out cool with the creation of things like the inklings and such for Splatoon but for the most part if I see Mario paragliding/surfing/skateboarding/dogging or whatever I know that when the game launches they'll have spent less time paying for facial modeling of some actor or doing months of R&D from the gameplay to make a relatable character, I know that game has had a more time on the gameplay because of that.
New game idea? Put Mario on the driving seat and get on with making the gameplay glorious, anyone who doesn't understand the benefit of this practice in game developement isn't really looking at the big picture of just how pointless and time wasting crafting something like Aiden Pearce .... wondering how many people even know the character I'm talking about with that due to his game being a pile of boring fetch quests.
Why not check me out on youtube and help me on the way to 2k subs over at www.youtube.com/stormcloudlive
