I agree, I think big publishers/studios deserve most of the blame for mismanagement, misaligned incentives, and risk-adverse behavior. I actually do agree with the proposal of showering devs, both past legends looking to make new games (such as Julian Gollop) and unknown indies, would be a great way to break out of the current bloated AAA process.
But I just think that appealing to past glories is looking at things with overly rose-tinted glasses. When you start to listen to war stories from a lot of the game designers from past hit games, you start to realize many of those titles were lightning in a bottle. I listened to a good interview with Clint Hocking of Splinter Cell fame and it basically established that it and Chaos Theory were made under very specific and strict circumstances, back when he was young and able to power through 70 hour weeks, unblinkingly, creating a new type of stealth game that hadn't existed before.
I'd love it if big studios tried to do that with seasoned designers by giving them fat stacks of cash and the mandate to make experiments as they like, but I doubt that they will usually yield the same level of greatness. (Not to mention, a lot of these designers might not even want to return to their past IPs- didn't know that Spector was, after Invisible War was a disappointment.) The originals were products of their times. It's a messy process.
Okay I’m trying to engage with your posts in good faith but that is a one-line content-less banality that could be made in response to any number of points I’ve brought up in the past two comments, it’s like chatbot generated text.
Btw, it's a team effort. Most of the time the unknown team members matter a lot.
There are ample good indie games/designers pop up every year who could use some funding.