IMO you're looking at things with the rose coloured glasses of youth. It's much more complicated than that. I look back at driving games in particular and, while I enjoyed many of them 10 or 15 years ago, the driving experience is far, far, far better today than it ever was back then, and the enhanced graphics, sound and levels of simulation available only add to that. Are the games perfect? No, not even close. But they are also incredibly more complex and the overall experience is much richer and more immersive than ever IMO. Modern games simply have exponentially more lines of code and with that comes exponentially increased levels of complexity and room for error.
And gaming has always been about money, then and now, no one works for a non-profit gaming company as far as I know. As with everything else, the marketplace determines the outcome in the long run. If people buy more of the better games in the long run, you'll have more of the better games in the marketplace. If people are buying more unfinished and broken games, then they are telling the marketplace that completion and brokeness don't matter, so much as just getting in and playing do.