To a publisher & investor, sales are always going to be the main goal; you don't have to play games to make money off of them. Any additonal quality which doesn't help sales is just extra costs, and are "unnecessary".
That is the truth, at least from their perspective.
There will always be generic cash-cows out there, regardless of medium (summer blockbuster films, enough said). The less effort (and cost) you have to put into a project which is guaranteed to make a profit, the better. Quite often these products will be polished to a bright shine, because refinement is guaranteed to help while innovation might not go over well; not to mention a certain minimum of quality is needed for the product to be acceptable, and that more often than not those easy-money franchises need an initial high-quality (or innovative) product to build the hype off of.
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Now, this isn't entirely a bad thing; nor is entirely a good thing. It's just a fact of life in any entertainment industry, the easy money-makers will always be around for someone to cash-in on them. The good news is that it means that there's more money flowing into the industry, allowing more games to be made and they'll be improved upon; many innovative games are made possible which otherwise wouldn't, simply because there's more money to throw around and publishers may be more willing to take risk. The bad news is that it also leads to a lot of clones & knock-offs trying to make the easy money, because publishers are going to jump at what they know will work. Unfortunately, the easy-money games are going to get a TON of publicity while the experimental ones won't (though at least it's getting made at all).
So yeah, an odd situation. While all the hype some games get (especially those one don't care to hear about) is annoying, the money they bring in is (at least partially) moving towards games which one may is interested in. You just have to sift through all the generic titles, ignore the hype, and wait patiently for the stuff you want.
Someone is always trying to do something new, and every so often it can become a hit.
There will always be those who want the utmost quality in the things they do.
They're just fewer in number than those who are there to make the money.
Call it a "necessary evil" if you want, but the money flowing into (and coming out of) the industry is generally a good thing. It's not like anyone's forcing you to buy & play the cash-cows if you're not interested in them. If they leave, the stuff you want will still be around... but it will take them longer to make, nor will they have the benefits of high production values which the generic cash-cows can pass along to them.
