Your opinion is awful at a level I have trouble describing if you had the slightest idea of what you were talking about you would have blamed Pokemon, if you had a better idea of what you were talking about you would have blamed Astroboy. If you were a galaxy brain you would realize that it wasn't any show it was economic inevitability. Saturday morning cartoons have always been made on a shoestring budget and ninety percent of them were always shit, and you know what's cheaper than animating from scratch? buying the rights to a show that has already done well in foreign markets and dubbing over it.
You make good points. I did consider Pokemon could also be blamed. Dragon Ball Z is just the one that sticks out as the worst offender. At least, as a TV show, Pokemon had a reason for being cheap slop, since it was primarily known in the states as a video game franchise. You are certainly right. There were a lot of them.
However, to your point, "economic inevitability" is not a children's television show. I'm well aware that, during the 90's, a large array of different factors hastened the death of traditional animation: CGI, cable, the overall explosion of affordable television channels, syndication, and so on. Economic viability and what a society considers tolerable are not one-and-the-same. You could argue that having designated shitting streets is economically inevitable; that doesn't mean the society that adopts designated shitting streets isn't to blame for accepting it as a tolerable solution at some point along the way.
In my opinion, Dragon Ball Z was a glaring milestone of shit TV that made tons of money for no good reasons related to taste. It is not alone. There are many, many shows like it, as you point out. My argument is that, at least here in the states, its ubiquitous popularity despite its total lack of any utility except as something epileptic to flash at your autistic kids is a particular shame. I disagree that good (or at least decent) writing is an economic or social luxury, and that random images and screaming will naturally prevail.
In terms of my criticism toward the writing, I generally think that nips can't write a single compelling story to save their own lives, and it boggles my mind that people who knew better in western countries let that cancerous style of non-writing become standard for every generation moving forward, even if it was motivated purely by greed.
In my mind, a show about green aliens in a desert screaming at one another for entire seasons and shooting lasers while powering up and doing literally nothing at all should have been nationally mocked, but it was instead retardedly popular.
