I said it many times before and I will say it many times more: Silver got disgraced by the curse of the game he appeared on and is actually one of the best Sonic charaters ever written, waiting for that potential to ever be used in a game.

Hot take: The unfinished state of 2006 derailed the entire franchise and it has not recovered to this day; the game would have been great if it had functioned as intended, but Sega interpreted the negative feedback over its technical incompetence at what it was trying to do to mean that what it was trying to do was itself the main factor of badness, and subsequently stopped caring about story, continuity and character development, all of which peaked in 2006.

Basically, if it had been Sonic 2007, the state of the series today would be completely different and better.