They were undoubtedly better shows, but whether or not they would have be successful with kids if shown today is a totally different matter. The single long running story through the series has a lot more tension and mystery, it really makes you want to keep watching.. but it's also harder to keep up with than the two-part arcs they do now, missing a week would leave you completely lost and the lack of constant action would probably just bore the kids, they need to see new toys to buy.
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So while I think they were better and would love to see a return to that format.. I don't think it would work
There are some changes to overall style of the Heisei series which I've never really understood. For example, the current focus on lighter and more episodic stories doesn't seem to have been caused by any drop of ratings of the previous format, or some big boost gained from adopting the new format. Decade did adopt this heavily episodic structure and it had some success with ratings, but it still had a darker atmosphere and also all the crossover stuff, so using it as a base is weird. W is probably the biggest success of the current format, ratings-wise, but, still, even that show merely kept Decade's numbers, rather than making the audience grow. OOO and Fourze have just lost audience afterwards.
In Fourze, the last big ratings boost it got was at the conclusion of the Aries story, which was really the biggest "running story" that the show had, concluding Meteor's subplot and also the build up of the Astro Switches all at once, two elements that had received quite a big amount of build up throughout previous episodes of the series, while most other events of its story were "compartmentalized" in 2 episodes, and even the foreshadowing and build up to them didn't have much presence. Those compartmentalized events that Fourze had later didn't seem to help its ratings at all.
Wizard has a more subdued and seemingly serious atmosphere than Fourze and that immediately gave it a ratings boost. However, now with the show going nowhere, the numbers seem to be dropping already...
The fact modern Riders are so reliant on form changes, collectible toys, new weapons, accessories and buddy robots is pretty telling.
I don't think it's pretty telling of anything, considering how Kuuga had more forms than most of his successors, had a bike attachment and two bikes, each one with two forms... It's not as heavy as the modern series, but it's not very distant and it was a big jump coming from the previous Riders.
I can't remember the last time in a modern show that we haven't seen at least two henshins per episode.
Fourze 47 only had one brief action scene... But, yes, that was much more common back then. I don't think that's a problem though. Some of the early Heisei stuff was interesting, but at times, it was basically an excuse to waste episodes on drama unrelated to the show's (or movie's) premise. Most of Inoue's last Rider works all have clear examples of that kind of thing being badly handled. It's almost like he just doesn't want to be writing toku in the first place. Now, it worked at times, like in Agito, but I don't think the current action focus is necessarily related to the lack of focus on a running storyline that they also have nowadays.
If anything, the storyline was sacrificed in favor of highlighting the monsters of the week. When I started watching Heisei Rider, I could barely remember them due to how little focus they had, they often even killed one of them just to bring another identical one or repaints right afterwards, which just made all their designs blend together more, but now most get lots of screentime and unique designs.
