SOOOOOOOOOOO TRUEEEEEEEE In all fairness it wasn't ALL headed in the wrong direction but as people have put it well there was a miscommunication between Toei Animation and Akira Toriyama. He said he wanted to go back to the roots and they took that as an excuse to find a way to make goku small and trawl out over hundreds of episodes over the utter-nonsense trivia japanimation is head-over heals, raging hard-on for. And of course it was a waste of everyone's time since if that's what they wanted in the first place they would have been tuning in 30 minutes earlier for sailor moon!