I suggest just laughing at the people who claim the designs are getting worse.
Yeah, I'm laughing pretty hard right now. Not at them, though. Mario hasn't innovated? That's the best joke I've heard all week. You've got Mario RPGs, Mario sports games, even the main platform series has Mario Galaxy which is
hugely innovative. Some series don't make any particular advancements and they're still somewhat fun, sure, but the
really good ones try new things. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. Rehashing the same thing fifty times gets old fast, though, and I was under the impression that Nintendo was supposed to be all about innovation.
Whatever, though, I'll be over here playing Bioshock, Portal, and the Mario games that apparently you've been skipping for the past ten years and enjoying myself while waiting for some
real innovation from this series.
For the record, I thought Colosseum was an entertaining and fresh game, even if the implementation was a bit flaky. I probably played through it more times than some of the games in the main series. I was honestly surprised when I found out that it was one of the most hated games in the series. I'm also the only person I've ever known who actually beat and saw the ending for Hey You, Pikachu!, another innovative game (especially for its time) that nobody seemed to give a chance.
Fanboys hating on every divergent game in the series is the reason we're still playing RBY with updated graphics and battles over ten years later. Thanks, fanboys, maybe if you would stop collectively wetting yourself over the new sprites (which, yes, I feel are worse than the old ones, but that's just taste) we could actually go somewhere.