And on top of that, some of the technological "advancements" actually make things worse. Personally I loathe the trend towards 3D-rendered "anime", artificially

And on top of that, some of the technological "advancements" actually make things worse. Personally I loathe the trend towards 3D-rendered "anime", artificially stuttered to make it resemble a hand-drawn animation. The only time such techniques are appropriate is when showing something mechanized. Used on regular characters, it looks terrible. Knights of Sidonia was a great show, but it looked really bad. The visually-best recent animes are ones like Devilman Crybaby that really embrace the hand-drawn medium and run with it.