I'm sure that games could be made, especially on modern budgets, that blow away the old systems. However you get diminishing returns on art assets for the amount of time invested when doing 2D graphics, and you get some issues that are tricky to resolve with meshing together the output of different artists (and possibly different styles) that simply aren't as evident in 3D games, which can get away with having actually hideous and poorly drawn textures, and still get hailed as "a visual masterpiece." 2D shows up any such problems much more readily, and that's before we even start talking about the relative fluidity of motion with each approach. I'm sure framerate dependence isn't a big issue anymore, but the old cheesy method of giving every character the same "flying through the air, on fire" sprite, regardless of size or gender, would still be with us for the sake of cutting corners.
It's a shame all their good 2D artists are long gone, because they were really starting to put out quality animation in the Darkstalkers era. How short it was...totally unlike, say, the classic era of Disney animation which stretched through most of the 20th century (but which, not coincidentally, has now been abandoned as well).
That's not to say it's a hopeless idea, or one that should be abandoned altogether:
"Unfortunately 2D became the excuse for poor storytelling," said [Pixar's] Lasseter, who pioneered the CGI animation revolution with Toy Story in 1995. "The general consensus was that audiences did not want to watch hand-drawn animated films, which is of course completely ridiculous. The day I stepped in we got in touch with these guys and set about bringing back the artists that Disney had laid off."
However, they still
didn't manage to pull it off.
