Why not developers just try to be inspired from great masterpieces? why not they try to gather all the best parts of different games together?

Imperialism for instance; A Great masterpiece considered by the majority of the gaming market, is unfortunatly obselete today. Now, the weak part of it is the graphics (was quite good then) and combat system. The structure is near perfect so keep it clean, just improve the graphics, implement a new combat system (and they can surely be inspired from Rome:Total war engine) and thats it! The city management and economics system of Rome:TW is relatively weak over imperialism so by gathering the strong parts of both games You've got a superb game!! you'll most likely to attract both Total war and imperialism lovers and kill 2 birds with a single stone!

PTO2 for instance. Another great yet remain an obsolete game. I wonder who remembers the title. There are lots to improve and same thing for imperialism goes for it also. Excellent structure, interface and depth in details. Poor in graphics and combat system. Surely AI needs to be improved but any little touch will be fine since Lots have improved by means of AI tech from its time. Can you imagine the details and versatility of PTO with Battlestations: Midway? would have been great! Here goes another one. Take Lords of the realm-2 and blend it with the relatively better combat engine of Stronghold! Stronghold is weak on the big picture & politics and LOTR2 is weak on combat and custom castle building. When united they will surely rock.

I always wondered why in earth, strategy game makers are not inspired by the way Master of Orion 2 handles the tech tree and the battles; MOO2 did have a great land battle screen, oh god i loved that little troops running on each other under massive fire. So simple yet so effective! They did that on 2000 why not they can now?

Another one, this one is for simulation. Remember Great Naval Battles? Lots of people played them for days and weeks at the time. The depth of detail was very nice. And Silent Hunter 3 has an excellent sim-engine yet a low resource demanding game (compared to similar games). I always liked the surface combat of SH3 as well as submerged torpedo attacks. The same game engine can be well suited to surface/Naval combats. You can simulate even air strikes with its engine on a more user friendly tactical map (Battlestations:Midway is a good example for that - but the dynamic sim-engine is a crap-sorry). Combine such great games for good, and create a nominee for a masterpiece.

So these games are known to be masterpieces and have lots of fans all over the world. If they cant create better then them, why dont they just be inspired of them and go for a certain winner?