Is Hardware getting TOO Powerful?

[Pemalite]

Peoples expectations on what makes a good game "good" has gotten more complicated over time.
We expect game mechanics to be more intricate and engaging.

Go back to 1990 where you could play an entire game with 2 buttons and your only function was run and jump. - Compare that to today where you could explore a galaxy, use motion controls and more, it's chalk and cheese on the complexity of game mechanics.

Not all graphics improvements increase the length of development time either... Tessellation reduced the need for building highly detailed environmental landscape geometry, we could use "n-patches" and scale it to the hardware instead.

We no longer need to bake details like lighting and shadowing anymore into the art assets, it can all be dynamic, massively reducing the work load there.

The two above examples are purely thanks to increases in hardware capability and they reduce development time.

At the moment I would argue the cadence of hardware improvements has slowed, we aren't getting that doubling of performance every year.