What is an Eclipse supposed to do?
The original two generations, thanks to their US production, were supposed to be "Japanese" cars that dramatically undercut the competition in price while still being obviously Japanese in their design, construction and powertrain. For the first generation (and somewhat less so with the second when it started having all of its reliability problems, and I don't mean just crankwalk), it worked. All of the competing cars were essentially priced out of the market as the 90s wore on, and the Eclipse was still pretty affordable.
The 3rd generation was supposed to be a way to reach a wider demographic while also being cheaper to assemble, purchase and maintain; since it became infeasible to continue building the Eclipse as an AWD turbocharged crazy machine which blew up all the time after the Eagle brand went away and the coupe market in general started tanking. The Eclipse had always been derived from the Galant, but the 3rd generation was much closer; and was designed to try to carve out the nice little market GM had managed to hold onto with the N-Body cars (side by side it's blatant that the 1998 Grand Am was the benchmark, if the idea of a Grand Am being a benchmark for anything isn't too depressing to think about) as everything larger died off. The final Hyundai Tiburon was also targeted in the same niche. It also essentially replaced the lower model 3000GTs in Misubishi's lineup. Considering the entire market was disappearing completely, it was also fairly successful, was undoubtedly the correct decision over another car like the first two, and holds a surprising fanbase.
The 4th generation was designed to be a cheap way of getting a knockoff of the Audi TT to market, with little regard for anything beyond that. Everything Mitsubishi USA was making at the time was completely half baked, and the huge success that the 2005 Mustang was made it irrelevant before it even came out. It bombed about as much as you'd figure, yet Mitsubishi continued to sell it after the Genesis Coupe came out. Probably so they could keep the lights on at the DSM plant when total production dropped to a tenth what it was a decade prior.