My immediate answer - Sonic fans.
I don’t really know what Sega and the Sonic Team can do anymore to make these fans happy. They’ve revisited the classic formula a few times, they tried going modern routes, they tried 2-D sprites in some entries, they try going full 3D and whatever. Nothing ever seems to be enough and that’s even when they’ve tried listening to the fanbase a few times.
Nothing seems to matter, regardless. The fans will find something to be upset about with Sonic. Anything.
I mean it makes sense that it’s hard to please Sonic fans. It wasn’t ever a good game, and so it literally exists solely due to nostalgia. Therefore if the base concept sucks they’re never gonna be able to make something fans like.
Then why do the fan game developers consistently nail what everyone wants? Christian Whitehead made a career out of it. Sonic Mania was the fruit of that labor. There is the modernization of Sonic Adventure 2 project that rebuilds the game on UE5 I think that everyone was universally floored by.
It isn’t that Sega has an impossible task to please Sonic fans, it’s that either their corpo overlords dont let them do what is needed to pull it off, or their egos are too large to allow them to listen to their fanbase. Sonic Team was internally pissed that Sonic Mania was more popular than the project they had worked on at the same time (I believe it was Sonic Forces), and then later the new 2.5d Sonic game didn’t do so well which rubbed them raw even more.
Sonic fans dont shy away from communicating what it is that they want, you know this to be true.