Awesome break down of a variety of factors that contributed to this. When i read it over it just makes alot of sense. The growth of online communities is something that slipped my mind but you are absolutely right that was starting to peak. Nowadays people give all the feedback in the world but whether game developers listen to it is a whole different story.

Ah man I never played a ton of them but I really loved the old ESPN X-Treme Games launch title that was on PSX. I played that a bunch.

Of course when dealing with stuff like this its ALWAYs subjective. But I have been doing alot of research on best sports games of all time lists for basis of seeing if I missed any good ones for emulation and these repeatedly kept popping up. A few articles I saw had ESPN 2k5 As the best sports ever in any sport.

https://www.complex.com/sports/best-sports-video-games - This has EPSN2K5 beating everyone and the games I mentioned before crack the top 10.

https://screenrant.com/best-baseball-video-games-all-time-reddit/ - According to reddit MVP Baseball 2005 is the best

https://www.mlb.com/news/best-baseball-video-games-in-history - Even baseball's official site has it listed as the top dog.

But you get the idea, alot of googling and these names kept popping up in their respective sports over and over and its amazing it kept being 2005. My guess is that alot of people saying it is the best could be a mix of nostalgia for sure and the most common average age of users on these sites is probably when they were growing up playing these games. However, having played most of them I can say the games hold up very well even today and it is easy to see why people regard them so highly.

NBA Jam and NHL 94 were great games in their own right and I would put them up with the great arcade sports games.