I think the hating on kaizo is honestly pretty unnecessary (and I know how that reads when I was initially against the sections merging years ago because back then I was worried about this happening lol) because the reality of rom hacking like this is it's always going to be community driven. If there are more people playing/watching/making kaizo hacks, there's going to be more kaizo hacks. Plain and simple. Frankly, I think people should be excited that more kaizo hacks are coming out because certain ideas will end up filtering down into normal hacks. Gimmicks and weird sprite combinations and the such will probably start popping up in regular hacks inspired from the kaizo hacks.
But I also think this is partially due to a pushback -against- easier hacks by the very people who play them. It's not enough for a short vanilla-ish hack to be submitted to the site anymore. Nobody will play it. Your hack needs to be a full game, have crazy gimmicks every level, have full custom ASM/graphics/etc etc, or any combination of the above for people to notice it at this point. Kaizo isn't in the same position because of a burst of popularity, meaning there's something fresh being brought to the table constantly, and they just naturally don't seem to end up needing to be 96 exit epics. This isn't the first time this has happened to regular hacks, mind you. The original VLDC was meant to be a counterpoint to all that as it is, being a level design contest where you submit one level and only use lunar magic, at a time when your hack needed exgfx and custom sprites to be considered "good"
A good idea I saw mentioned here was the "multiple options for filtering difficulty" one. I think checkboxes and you can untick the difficulties you don't want would work really well. I've kinda been wanting that feature myself since I'm bad at Mario and would want to look at just easy and normal hacks at the same time sometimes.
But I also think this is partially due to a pushback -against- easier hacks by the very people who play them. It's not enough for a short vanilla-ish hack to be submitted to the site anymore. Nobody will play it. Your hack needs to be a full game, have crazy gimmicks every level, have full custom ASM/graphics/etc etc, or any combination of the above for people to notice it at this point. Kaizo isn't in the same position because of a burst of popularity, meaning there's something fresh being brought to the table constantly, and they just naturally don't seem to end up needing to be 96 exit epics. This isn't the first time this has happened to regular hacks, mind you. The original VLDC was meant to be a counterpoint to all that as it is, being a level design contest where you submit one level and only use lunar magic, at a time when your hack needed exgfx and custom sprites to be considered "good"
A good idea I saw mentioned here was the "multiple options for filtering difficulty" one. I think checkboxes and you can untick the difficulties you don't want would work really well. I've kinda been wanting that feature myself since I'm bad at Mario and would want to look at just easy and normal hacks at the same time sometimes.