It seems more likely that Enter and Escape were given monster forms both for marketing reasons and to give the actors time off for other work.
I doubt very much that it would be for marketing reasons, since Sentai villains don't receive merchandise in Japan. It would have to be for production reasons-- giving the duo monster forms means you can shoot more and better fight scenes, since you can use a suit actor and voice over to portray the character. Regardless of whether you thought Enter and Escape's action scenes were good, it is probably harder to film them using the "drama" actors than using the stunt crew.
What I was getting at was that I would never consider Ley Garus to be a major villain since he well... "I pick things up and put them down. Roar!".
Whether or not a villain is major should be dictated by screen time, moreso than what the character does. Otherwise you end up with arguments like yours, which is, "This character can't be major because they weren't very complicated." I would say Ley Garus would count as major simply by virtue of being in so many episodes. He's not the most major, nor a focal point of the story, but he still gets a buttload of screentime (as opposed to, say, a MotW).
and this happens every year, nothing surprising.
I dunno, Go-Busters had a lot of hype behind it. Not as much as Gokaiger, but way more than Goseiger or Shinkenger had at the time. It really came off like this was what Toei/Bandai wanted to be the next big thing and the new direction for Sentai, and that they were going all-in to commit to the series. That's part of what made the show's direction change later on so brutally apparent.
While I won't touch on "ridiculously boring," since that's subjective and all - why does the issue of "it was doing nothing new" come up so often?
Because during Go-Busters's first quarter, the show's defenders generally argued that fans should be patient with the show, because it was doing something new and different with Sentai. And the first quarter of the show definitely qualifies as that, I think.
So the fact that the series as a whole feels so derivative honestly is a problem. Either Toei beat the originality out of the series, thereby defeating the show's point, or Go-Busters was always meant to be a show that sold itself on style while the plot mostly just rehashed Fiveman.
In such a long franchise, isn't it... sort of expected that themes are going to be reused?
Years ago I heard a piece of excellent writing advice that sums up the issue here: "All writers steal, so make sure you steal from Woolworth's." That is, it's impossible for a modern writer not to be influenced by the stories around them. So when you imitate other works in your own stuff, make sure you imitate only the very best. The advice is really about the importance of cultivating good taste as a reader, so you can develop a solid foundation from which to write.
Go-Busters, as I mentioned above, mostly rehashes a show called Fiveman. There's influence from other Sentai and tokusatsu there, but the lion's share of Go-Busters is, seriously, just a "grittier" take on the plot of Fiveman. Now, the problem with that is... well, Fiveman is not broadly considered a great show. I know it has its fans around here, and I've seen enough of it to say it's got some good episodes and characters. But it's simply not Sentai at its best, and at points is arguably the franchise at its worst.
That Go-Busters's producers attempted to spend a year rehashing Fiveman, a show that crashed franchise ratings and toy sales to an all-time low, just smacks of hubris. And it really is mostly a rehash. Go-Busters contains very few story elements that aren't from Fiveman. They're not elements being reinterpreted or significantly updated, either. So Go-Busters doesn't prove capable of addressing the problems that dragged down Fiveman. It just ends up repeating them.
Compare this to, say, Kyoryuger. Now Kyoryuger isn't really original, either, but when it steals from older Sentai seasons it a) steals from a lot of them, b) only steals from really good ones, and c) is careful to approach concepts in a new way. Kyoryuger is really indebted to Sentai seasons like Zyuranger, Carranger, Abaranger, and Dekaranger, but all of these series are considered all-time greats. And while Kyoryuger's plot reuses elements of these series, it recombines them in ways that
feel fresh and new.
