New Always Better?

Are new things always better? The way I emphasize always, the answer is almost certainly not.

But why not? If it's not better in some dimension, why bother making something new?

In fact I even wish new things are always better. It's the little bit of romanticism in me that I hang on to as a lower case cynic.

I have an ant farm in the form of Dwarf Fortress. It runs in the terminal in textual mode, it looks kinda like this. Mine has been running for 398 game-years. It's not impressively long, but long enough for its world history to far exceed everything what Marvel Comics has produced to date.

But should new things always be better? Should there be new versions of the same things that are inferior by design? Not in the sense of Coke Zero vs Coke classic, which are designed for different intentions. Think of this like a song that is covered badly, by intention.

Obviously the person doing the remastering always thinks he is doing the world a favor by improving upon a classic.

Is there ever value in setting out to write a version of say, the Torah, that is objectively worse?

Recently, Dwarf Fortress version 50 was made available on Linux to upgrade from v47.

This is a breaking change. My existing world wouldn't run in v50. Even if it does, v50 doesn't support textual mode for me to run off of my home server over SSH.

Not in the sense that we thought the new one is better but realize it's worse after a long time. More like it's taken as worse across the board in the moment. Think Star Wars Episode I to III, as if George Lucas set his mind out to tank the franchise.

The fact that current opinions on the Prequels have changed makes that even more interesting. I don't know where to begin with that one.

I intend to keep my DF world running for a long time. This means I have no choice but to downgrade and run DF v47, no matter how good future versions are.

Parody kinda falls into this as a category. The value is found in the lolz.

That is, when you make something new that is this level of a downgrade, it can only be a joke.

It's problematic when uncanny parody is mistaken for something original if it's not being overt enough in the thing it is insulting. Case in point: Starship Troopers.

Still, parodies never mean to succeed their subject. They don't truly count as next-version-but-worse.

I didn't go about defining the parameters of better or worse. But I did say objectively so, there's no hiding behind "it's all relative."

In 12 years time, computing architecture might have drastically changed. But the binaries of DF v47 would still have to run on x86 architecture.

If Tarn Adams is still kicking, it might be DF v64.

But I'd still be running DF v47.

So should the new be better, always?