so by sticking with that limitation they are stifling creativity and the series is becoming stale.
I LOL'd real hard right there. The series was pretty stale when X came out and that didn't do TOO much to differentiate itself. Now you have 2 Legends games (plus 1 spinoff) and countless Battle Network games, 4 MMZ games and i don't know how many MXZY whatever games their are now for the DS. MM has spin-offs of spin-offs in its own series, nothing says stale like that.
Back to the other point we were arguing, I just feel that MM9 going back to the classic style graphics DID in fact improve the gameplay because capcom now no longer had to worry about the animation they way they did with MM7/8/MM&B which actually slowed down the action making those games incredibly boring compared to the NES games (which was made even more appearant by already having a few X series games under my belt when I finally played MM7/8/MM&B). There's also the fact that the level design no longer suffered from MM8's 2d sidescrolling on sprites intended to look 3Dish which, if i recall correctly, had many players missing platforms because they'd look like you could land on them but the platforms edge wasn't really there, causing cheap deaths that in the NES games wouldn't of happened because everything was flat. Though i think some of the X series games (after 4) had similar issues, but of course with the wall-jump move available, it probably wasn't as big a problem.
So there, thats my opinion on MM9 and mine alone. I'm sorry you don't see it that way, and I don't understand the point of keeping the argument going because we both know if capcom wanted to, they could've made the game look and sound like an NES game but done things the NES couldn't do; like have more than 3 M-buster shots on screen at once, plus more enemies, etc... but that wasn't the point of the game. They weren't trying to innovate or reinvent the series, it was just fan service. Guess you're one of those people in the "just don't get it" category.