I felt no need for the PS2 personally; I have access to one through my brother (we share a flat and all our consoles) but between Xbox and Gamecube I could've been quite happy with skipping PS2 entirely.

And as did I, we just assess them differently.

So do I. But I also compare those ports to what else is available today... And Halo: Combat Evolved if it is re-released today on the Xbox One is a pretty average game comparatively.

And that is the issue... You are not considering the competition and what else is available.

Combat Evolved in 2001 was absolutely ground breaking and genre defining, the visual set-pieces, the open-level design, the story, the audio, the A.I... It was leading the industry. A 2020 re-release? No way. - Games are far more immersive, story driven and open ended these days... Games have evolved, pun intended.

The Xbox One has not had a single game in it's entire 7 year life-span that has redefined an entire gaming genre and led the industry in game design and game popularity. Not one. The Original Xbox had several... And that is why it is the more ground breaking, innovative device, relative to it's competition.

It's quantity vs quality vs competition vs comparative quality... But you aren't taking everything into account.

Yeah... Except you aren't getting 8x Xbox One consoles linked together to form a LAN party to play Halo. You just don't get that kind of experience anymore.

Xbox One hasn't really been getting games that are setting records with how much copies get sold on launch day, you aren't having people line-up for days in order to be first in-line to grab a copy, you aren't getting all of that broadcasted on news networks showcasing game popularity.

The Original Xbox was.

So whilst the Xbox One has a notable library... One that I would argue is mostly pinched from the Original Xbox, Xbox 360 and other platforms rather than with exclusive content... The Original Xbox had a far more notable impact on the entire gaming industry and that really cannot be understated or ignored.

Yeah. The Xbox One not being a super popular console across the planet hasn't really done it's multiplayer populations any favors in various regions.
Other platforms don't exhibit similar issues thankfully in regards to multiplayer populations as they generally sell better overall.

And hopefully the Xbox Series X can turn that all around, because the Xbox ecosystem would benefit greatly from it and so would it's consumers.

And you are making it easy for me to say Original Xbox, you haven't really provided a compelling argument for me to change my mind.
But you know... People, opinions and entitled to those and stuff.

You make a point, Gamecube was also nice to have if you owned a Xbox. Those two consoles helped fill voids in each library.

Hence, I could see you being satisfied with those two. But neither had a particularly strong library on their own.

Again, I am just looking at the entire libraries. Go look at the entire Xbox One library if you feel there is a lack of quality. I see plenty.

A lot of ground breaking games aren't necessarily great experiences now either. So I am setting aside nostalgia. Just looking at the library.

Looking at what is the most played content on Xbox One, I think it would be difficult to convince many the OG Xbox actually has a better library. So yeah, opinions and all that jazz.

False equivalency that just because the Xbox One is not leading the industry with game releases that they are lacking in quality, Ori and Gears 5 are extremely high quality, they just aren't setting the industry standard in game design, they aren't the most played games for months/years after release like Halo 2.
If that is the "statement" that you have falsely acquired from my posts, then I am either not explaining myself properly or you aren't paying attention.

The Xbox One has a ton of great games, I actually went out and stated this outright in a previous post. - But you aren't taking comparative quality into account.

...Seriously? Hence the word "Comparatively" that I have been using.

Yes if you were to compare the Xbox one console to the Playstation 4, Switch... The Xbox One comes up short, it has less exclusives, smaller game populations and so forth... As a console it's peers has it beat, Microsoft dropped the ball out the gate, it's comparative quality as a platform is beaten by it's current competition.

But if you compare the Original Xbox against it's peers, the Playstation 2 and Gamecube it was pioneering technologies and game design that laid the foundations for future console generations to emulate, programmable shaders, hard drive, broadband online multiplayer, Halo, Forza, Fable, open world Morrowind... Even the controller shape of the new Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 can be traced to what was done with the Xbox controller.

And that is why it's the superior platform, it influenced the entire industry for generations to come and we are all better for it.

The Xbox One? Not so much. It's a pretty much a "me too" device... A large chunk of that was due to early miss-steps involving always-online DRM and the Kinect, higher price and the backlash that all received...

I rushed out and bought the Original Xbox for Halo and Fable.
I rushed out and bought the Xbox 360 for Halo 3 and Fable 2 and Gears of War.
I didn't rush out and buy the Xbox One for Halo 5 or Gears of War... I owned those games on release, but they just didn't excite like the older games did, even if they are technically superior... There are so many amazing games these days, the bar has simply shifted.

Neither system had an amazing lineup, true, but on the whole I still think the Xbox's lineup was pretty darn solid; it got the majority of third party multiplatform games, usually the best version of them, and some pretty notable games that never came to PS2/Gamecube.

Right, OG Xbox had a solid library. I generally played ports on it as well. The content it was getting exclusively, like PC games, really appealed to me as well.

Yet I also think its fair to say the Xbox One library is more robust, more notable titles and it even trounces OG Xbox in some of its best genres.

At what point do you just acknowledge we have different perspectives?

Library vs library and quantity of notable titles, I feel Xbox One easily takes it.

If you wanted to argue which platform had more groundbreaking titles, I would lean OG Xbox. Bear in mind I am a person that has called this era gen 7.5.

I guess that just brings us back to a simple difference in our personal assessment, namely my position of OG Xbox having killer exclusives and Xbone lacking them, and those older games being available via back compat not being comparable to fresh new games in my opinion.

While the OG Xbox was unique, I feel many of the things that made the 360 successful were incorporated into the Xbox One and after major hangups and some polishing, are essentially creating a better gaming experience. In other words, the Xbox One allowed MS to learn numerous things that will help them in the future.

So I'd say the XBO. I think the XBO is the source of MS's increasing services revenue whereas the OG Xbox was an Nvidia box with overly expensive components that died too early despite being a great machine and leading to adopting media storage within consoles.