Greentext

That's like saying too many people listen to music and it's flooded with mediocrity, there's a lot of really unrelated genres and time periods, and trends that come and go continually, like everything there's a big amount of meh tier work.

I'll be honest here; anime has always been a large sea of mediocrity, with the few sprinklings of stuff that is occasionally actually good, and some incredibly rare few things that are consistently good.

Now they don't even bother with localization anymore.. which would be a good thing except now we have screens full of untranslated onscreeb Kanji that the story demands you be able to read and overly long and literal titles like "The Time I Gained The Power To Turn My Sister's Panties Into Angelic Guns By Meeting God On The Planet Golbacky While Drinking My Juice In The Hood That Tuesday Night." Which aren't even what people in Japan call the show since even in the tongue of Nippon that'd take too dang long.

Hell you're lucky if there's even a dub at all. Let alone one that hasn't been beaten to the ground by politics

eh it hasn't declined in popularity to the point people think you're talking about some ancient thing when you mention it

I got into anime when you had to go to shitty distributor conventions, in shitty city limits hotels, and walk through a big room filled with smoke, rifling through boxes of tapes, while greasy guys in cheap suits tried to talk you into buying shit. The other option were shoddily scanned, black and white, prints of distro catalogues you could order from. They would always be companies you never heard of, from buildings in weird places, and you could never know if you were actually going to get something, or just lose that money. The Sci Fi channel would have saturday morning anime, which would play, uncensored, stuff, but generally only the biggest hits. So it would cycle through Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Bubble Gum Crises, and about a dozen others.

It started to get a better at the end of the 90s, when you had a couple larger distros that came on to the scene, and you could reliably get what you paid for. They would also always have previews of other anime they were selling before the movie started, and it was likely set to some KMFDM track. Then in the 2000s is when it sorts hit a sweet spot, it was easy to get, there were multiple options on TV, and it hadn't quite yet become totally mainstream. Haven't really bothered with it much since then. Sometimes I will get recommendations from people I know I can trust to not be suggest the millionth iteration of watered down Fist of the North Star, fan service vehicles, or things that are just collages of bad anime tropes turned into a show.