It's been said by people all over the industry that the console changeover was moving too fast and everyone wants it to slow down. Sony, MS, the developers... no one wants to move on at the rate they were doing before. The whole point of the Kinect launch is to see how much longer they can drag the 360 out, if it takes off in a big way, the console's lifespan will increase. Sony is going the same thing with the Move and all it's XMB updates. I know the 10-year life cycle means support and not necessarily as the lead console, but nevertheless we're going to see bigger gaps this time because otherwise MS and Sony end up investing hundreds of millions and the developers never really get the chance to master the console before they're given a new one and all their training starts over with a bunch of sub-par games.
You have a point but :
The 360 has already been around for a longer time than the xbox, we haven't seen ANY form of graphical advancement in like a year now.
All that's being released lately (and soon) is more sequels and reboots , that sometimes look slightly better than last year's incarnation at the cost the framerates and resolution.
I doubt the industry has ever been more stagnant than it is today...
If by mastering the hardware you mean trying to optimise the level design to get around the weak hardware and ram limit,then sure...
Multi core support and dx9 shaders (lol) have been mastered a long time ago, and on pc developers have been moving on for a while now.
Pc devs and companies like amd and nvidia are (and have been) working on better , more efficient dx10 and dx11 shaders, higher quality and most importantly much more efficient texture compression , new normal mapping techniques, tesselation etc etc.
There is a cutoff point at which spending resources on trying to improve old technology becomes pointless as better and more efficient technology becomes available.
Imo we reached that cutoff point atleast a year ago.
With your logic we should stick to petrol powered combustion engines for another 50 years because there is still some extra efficiency to squeeze outa them.
Meanwhile conveniently ignoring the fact that all these efficiency tricks like lighter materials, power recovery to the battery on braking (which BMW likes to boast about) and tyres with less roll resistance have absolutely **** all to do with combustion engines themselves).
The same applies to many of the supposed 'mastering' of the consoles. (MLAA,ridiculous amounts of optimisation etc).
Any actual programmer and artist probably can't wait to move on to better technology so they can finally have more room for creativity.
It's only the beancounters,stockholders and anyone that is in the business for the money instead of the love for the art that would like for the industry to stop evolving and for everyone to still be using a ps3 in 2020...
It's sad how people get more and more brainwashed and told what to think and want by marketing companies.