Guess there weren't standards and easy engines to create bad habits back then, so the programmers, designers and artists had to do things the hard way and hardship made them better. Easiness generates lazyness, actually, this was one of the big problems of kickstarter, when you are burning your own money, you sure are hell motivated to be as efficient as possible not so much when you are burning other people money.
I keep hearing about laziness in connection with game devs, and it's just so very wrong to attribute laziness to people who are expected to work longer hours for less pay and routinely go through "crunch" periods to get their products to completion only to then be sacked right after. You can call them anything, and some of it will probably even be deserved, but lazy is not it.
These people aren't exceptionally incompetent, or lazy, or flawed in any other particularly significant way. They are just same normal imperfect people like everybody else. The difference however is that it used to be different. In the past, when computer games were only becoming a thing, it was a very novel and exciting field to work in. It was truly uncharted land of unlimited possibilities and many exceptionally talented individuals rushed in to explore it. We are spoiled by products of labor of those exceptional individuals, expecting that everything in video games should forever be able to uphold the same exceptional standard. But this is not a realistic expectation. Video games are not that exciting of a field anymore, and naturally the talented people will gravitate towards different opportunities more often these days.
