Well, I don't think I need to say that I enjoyed Decade more than Gokaiger, considering my post history. Even as far as the "homage" goes, Gokaiger's often just felt pointless to me. In Decade, each "world" completely dominated the episodes, bringing new supporting cast and antagonists in various roles. Also, even though they were generally alternate versions different from the original, they often still go to be active and push the premise of their small arcs forward, while in Gokaiger, its own premise made it so the "guests" were just supporting material for the Gokaiger.
I mean, just look at the Kuuga World. The climax is Onodera appearing to help a Decade surrounded by Grongi, finally deciding to fight for everyone's smiles, not just to impress a girl. Something like that would never happen in Gokaiger - you'd be more likely to see the Gokaiger appearing to help the "guest" after he tries to fight powerlessly - and then he'd just leave afterwards and leave the fight to the Gokaiger. Even if they were alternate versions in Decade, the interactions there actually still resembled crossovers, while what we got in Gokaiger didn't deviate much from the standard Sentai format, aside from the guests being returning characters from previous shows.
Gokaiger couldn't even actually keep Machalcon around as a main cast member, in spite of initially introducing him as their partner and using him in what should have been a Gokai-only combination. Even in the few cases where there were team ups, we got the "guests" just returning their powers to the Gokaiger after the battle was over or going away for no reason at all.
Not simple. If the previous characters, with their powers, stay throughout the series, they will just overshadow the new guy.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. Even if they had gone for original versions, they'd only appear in a few episodes and some wouldn't even appear out of suit due to lack of actors (Kuuga, at least). Decade would still be the constant element of the show.
The point is that they
wanted to make Decade about him travelling through reimaginations of the original stories, always with some big twist thrown there. Even using AUs, they could just have gone with scenarios similar to the original ones, but played with different actors, with Decade arriving in the middle of some important point, but that's not what they wanted. In fact, aside from Den-O, they avoided letting the original writers of each show return to write the alternate versions shown in Decade even if they were avilable (like how Yonemura didn't write Kabuto's world, Inoue didn't write Hibiki and Sho Aikawa didn't write Blade). However, it's clear that, although they wanted to make the AUs reference the original shows in some points, they also wanted each AU to be different from the original ones in some way. The only one that escaped was Den-O and that likely was just due to the movie airing at the same time as those episodes.
How do you know this? And why wasn't it their intention? I still want to know how the Hibiki and Den-O casts were brought back if they didn't want to go that route.
I think it's pretty obvious that they brought back Den-O's cast due to the simultaneous production of the Chou Den-O movie.
After that, it became kind of pointless to try to keep avoiding original actors, thus Hibiki's cast returning... and more. Missing Ace also got its cast back for the Diend World, and they attempted to get Black RX's cast back too (Well, Kotaro's and Kazumi no Jo's actors, although Jo's actor refused to return in the end, so the script makes a bunch of references to him, but he's always conveniently off screen). Shinkenger obviously had its cast too.
Case of bad memory but, didn't they bring back Toshiki Kashu too (for one of the movies or something)?
It was pretty much the same thing as when the past Rangers talked to the Gokaiger via the Ranger Keys in 199 Heroes.
It's kind of different though, at least in Black RX's case. Aside from the out of suit cameo, there were two fighting scenes with Black RX in the movie, and he even helps defeating one of the main villains, so it's not like he only pops up to say some words. Agito's is closer to that though, he only gets a few seconds against random monsters in the All Riders battle and then Shouichi's words at the end (it's even worse than the 199 Heroes cameos, in fact, considering how his speech was much shorter, only two lines of dialogue).
