So the first episode of G-Quuuuuux aired recently (I jokingly call it G-Quacks Gunduck because of how it's pronounced). Very poor music surrounded by otherwise solid animation, plenty of action, minimal annoying if any characters, good world building, and yeah this is a typical Universal Century entry. Most UC entries tend to get 8 or 9 our of 10s from me for those exact reasons with rare cases of them getting 10s (Victory, 0083, Narrative, and Requiem) or something lower (CCA, the Doan's Island movie, Turn A, and 0080). This doesn't seem like a big deal to many, but I have considered Gundam as the gold standard of real robot quality since most entries; minor quality dips aside it was very reliable in what you were going to get and most of the dips were from shorter entries that couldn't maintain a proper run time. Then Age came in had its death by a thousand bad writing decisions that have been documented to death, the fandom went "oof", but it went mostly back to normal with both Build Fighters entries and G-Reco even if the latter you could tell Tomino was being hindered either by old age or whatever was plaguing him since Brain Powerd. Then came Iron Blooded Orphans, an anime so bad I actually re-evaluated what I'd consider a 1 out of 10 on the anime spectrum and stirred something dark. Like there was almost no standard of quality on any level. Gone were the days of action scenes, good animation, good music, fast pacing, likeable protagonists, or even world building. It convinced me you need standards. Gold turned to lead. Sure, following it there were quite a few 10 out of 10s with Thunderbolt, Build Divers, and Narrative coming out so close to each other (and technically Re:Rise, but it was a minor downgrade and Twilight Axis was a short mostly from one person so you can only go so far against it), proving there was a standard even if it lost a tad of luster. Then Hathaway's Flash came and dipped in the shorts and movies. Not only did it have a ton of problems, but not counting things I've given a 1 out of 10, it has the absolute worst soundtrack of any anime or movie I've ever heard in my life. That isn't a joke. It really was a Krusty yelling "What the hell was that?" moment for me; this is ignoring the fact it was the only piece of animation that, for large chunks of the run time, was so dark or blurry I could barely tell what I was supposed to be looking at. You need to be able to see things in a visual story and HF actually had the idea to make that challenging for its audience. For those reasons I was hopeful Witch From Mercury might be a return to form for main series Gundam... Instead we got the Valvrave guy remaking Valvrave swapping the vampire elements with Utena with many of the same problems from the former minus infinite twists and nonsensical sexual assault (which he had no problem shoving into Grendizer U, ending Go Nagai's filmography gold standard much to the irritation of fans like myself). The production values were better than IBO, but it barely managed to get to the lower end of mediocre by the end. And that ending of the final battle so needed to be explained better and just wasn't. It's like Sunrise knew how bad it was going to get so they put out Seed Freedom and Requiem out as palette cleansers showing "guys please, Gundam can still be good and of high quality, we swear!" It's not even like real robot franchise are in the tubes; Macross Delta, FMP Invisible Victory, Fafner The Beyond, and Code Geass: Roze of The Recapture all elevated their franchises in the last nine years and became their best entries. The ground is fertile. The talent is there. They have the technology.