Retro-like games: beautiful? Ugly? A non-creative way to sell to people too attached to nostalgia?

There are a lot of games with retro-like graphics and gameplay that are really charming. However, there are a lot of them which really take advantage of the nostalgic feelings of people who "miss the gold era of games". That's not a wrong strategy. But...

1. Some of those retro-like games are not so good. For real, some of them are mediocre and if they had no retro-like elements, they would get a lot of bad reviews. Though, they gain fast popularity for being retro-like. Because of that, other people buy it and feel inclined to like them due to nostalgia and due to the influence of other buyers' praises, beside the fact that you really feel pressed to like something you paid for. But that's ok, that's normal, people have different likes and have the right to like retro-like games.

2. However, the fast popularity of some retro-like games make companies and even indie developers choose the lazy way of releasing games which are visually poor, but since they are considered "retro", they got some kind of silent forgiveness (and even a certain prestige for doing it). In other words, being retro became an excuse to not being creative, innovative.

Ok, there are some excellent retro-like games which do innovate, even being based on old concepts. My question is: couldn't some of them be even better if they were not guided by nostalgic effects?

• That's the case, for example, of Mega Man 9 (and, after that, I suppose that a lot of people who still don't hate me will start to hate me now). I don't know when retro wave began, but at that time Capcom decision of making once again an 8-bit Mega Man may have pleased a lot of old fans. Some of other fans didn't like it. But, in other words, while there was only Mega Man 9, there was some room for doubts, at least.

• So Mega Man 10 came. I mean: come on! Now it was obvious and clear the laziness and the lack of competence of that company to revive one of their most beloved franchises in an innovative good way. I'm not saying both games are technically bad. But it was an obvious short-cut to get money from too nostalgic fans with not much work.

• The worst thought is imagining that they would not even need to release some kind of "Super Mega Man Galaxy" to make a good job. They didn't need to reinvent the wheel to make a good game. They could have released a visually enchanting new Mega Man (something like Mega Man 8, which today I think it's ugly, but it was considered beautiful at the time), and they would have, maybe, an artistic masterpiece.

Well, what do you think about that "retro wave" or the retro effects? What are the mediocre games which, in your opinion, got benefit of being considered retro and, thus, explored nostalgic feelings more than being really authentic and original?

We can see nowadays on Steam itself obvious clones of existing games from NES/SNES era which don't even try to disguise themselves. There are average games which at least tried to innovate in some way, which always involve taking some risks. It's somewhat sad to see that those ones who try not to take any risks if possible have been awarded better for their poor work.