Honestly it's the "12ep+1OVA" seasonal format bringing everything down. 24~26 episodes is the bare minimum you can get away with for a single story arc but nearly everything gets condensed to half that length.

It used to be that anime adaptations needed to maintain a balance between padding the runtime and keeping things interesting so they had to get creative and go into more detail.

Imagine if DBZKai (167 episodes) or FMA:B (64 episodes) had to fit their stories into 13 episode seasons.

FMA would be 24 episodes and an OVA, minor character (like barry) would be cut entirely and characters like Hawkeye would get 3 lines then only occasionally show up in the background.

For DBZ, Season 1 would be 6.5eps of saiyan saga, 6.5eps of namek, 1ep of reviving everyone and frieza landing on earth.

Season 2 would be 4.5eps of Androids, 4.5eps of cell, 1ep of reviving everyone and buu waking up.

Season 3 would be 1ep of world tournament, 5eps of Majin Buu Saga, 6eps of Evil Buu Saga, 1ep of World Tournament w/ Uub.

Hell, Bleach would be hilarious---Rukia would be captured on ep6 instead of ep17 rescued on ep12 instead of ep62, and ep13 would be them relaxing while aizen sits on his chair.. There'd be no second season.

If seasonals were still 26 episodes and the continuous-run format still existed, post-2010 anime would honestly be as good or better than pre-2010 anime.

Maybe if some animes were actually GOOD but then again my tastes might have just changed.

Binges on Kamen Rider