Where did the skate series go completely wrong?

[heshfield]

I hate s3 too. Mack is dead-on.

I think, if you love skateboarding (in the modern, current sense) then youre disappointed in the direction the series went--thats why the community went to shit and continues to die.
The game is made for gamers...not skateboarders. And why? ..because that was EA's way of increasing sales--impressing real skaterborders and giving them a game they would love was furthest from their minds.

What made OG great was that it was made by skateboarders for skateboarders.
My speculation is that, as the series went on, less and less of each development team actually knew about skateboarding, and they had no clue that what they were making was complete crap. Who in their right mind would try to pass off these shitty animations and ugly-ass character designs?