Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "archaic". 2D skeletal animation makes possible a lot of things that wouldn't be an option with frame by frame. Variable height of characters is one of them, multi-track animations another, and I could keep on but I know you know them, so I won't spend precious time stating the obvious.
I'll leave
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one example of what you *can* do with Spine. Granted, that's the demi-god of animation Dao Le Trong, but it's just to illustrate how you're not actually limited.
Well, it's the same as that sterile debate about which is best for making games, Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, whatever. All of them are okay to make a great game. But you see people mocking Unity because a lot of amateur devs have made not so great games on that platform.
What I suppose you mean is that we should try with 3D models, and that is a totally different tune, Ari. It's not really a different way of doing things, at a technical level, but also on the aesthetics side. And not only you'd need to make the characters 3D, but also the environment, and that requires a lot more people than two or four team members. People that know what they're doing, which is usually not the case in this small endogamic world of ours.
At the end of the day, what it really limit your progress are *your* limits as a flesh and bone human being, not the capabilities of the platforms you're using.