A large part of the reason why Sega is being rectonned from gaming history has to do with the sort of games that populated the Genesis library, and the kind of games that populated the SNES library. Sega's roots as an arcade company show - they generally made arcade games for the home, and other companies kind of followed their lead. This mean the games were often more difficult, and were usually focused on shorter experiences that took a long time to master. A typical, quality genesis title would be one that you could complete, start to finish, in about an hour if you were good enough, where getting good enough meant you had to spend weeks honing your skill. They excelled at making the kind of games where, every time you play, you got a little better and little farther.
Nintendo, by contrast, from the moment the NES dropped, changed their entire development philosophy. You can see it way back in games like Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. These are games you are meant to complete. They are long games if played correctly. As time went on, this philosophy really grew. The games people frequently cite all follow this formula - games with save features, where you are expected to make constant progress. The difficulty never really ramps, games generally aren't massively different in stage 1 vs stage 10 or whatever. Look at the games people list - Mario World, Final Fantasy, Super Metroid. Those are games where you are constantly progressing, you are never meant to basically start over.
As time went on, that model of game took over the industry. Outside of indie and smaller DD games, you never really have games with game overs anymore. The type of games SNES catered to, are the same style of games people play today. That means that today's youth, when they go back and play old games, go looking for games that play similar to modern games. That inevitably leads them to the SNES libary.
Time has dulled senses and made people forget the kind of games they liked on the Genesis. I can rattle off a hundred titles for the Genesis I could recommend, and more for the Master System and Saturn, but even then I suspect many would be turned off by what I recommend for the reasons above. I'll swear up and down that Ranger X was fucking incredible back in the day, one of the best games on the Genesis library, but someone will inevitably download the rom, play it for 10 minutes, get a game over, and call the game bullshit. Because that's not how it was meant to be played.
In reality, the games people remember and like from Sega, the ones that act and feel like Nintendo titles, are the extreme minority of their total output as a company. I think the average person is more in love with a type of game from Sega, than Sega themselves. Me? I adore Sega's outputs entirely - their stuff on the SMS and Saturn are my favorite things the company ever put out. I see the SMS and Saturn as being extremely similar systems, and I similarly see the Genesis and Dreamcast as being extremely similar. The SMS, early on, was mainly a bastion for Sega's Arcade output. Sega's best teams at the time worked in the arcades, and the early SMS output fell into two groups - good arcade ports (like Wonderboy), and generally bad original software (Like Alex Kidd in High Tech World). Near the end of the western life cycle, Sega (and their shadow contract developers like SIMS and Westone) gradually began creating games intended for the home market, similar to Nintendo's output, and that's where we get universally hailed SMS titles like Phantasy Star and Wonderboy III. That development philosophy kind of carried over to the Genesis and you got more titles in that vein, like Sonic the Hedgehog or Shining Force.
I see the Saturn the same way. Early on, mostly Arcade ports. Near the end, they started producing some amazing home-first games, like Panzer Dragoon Saga, and that style of game really bled over to the dreamcast where it flourished for two glorious years. Honestly, aside from graphics, Saturn titles from 1998 generally feel like dreamcast titles. It's weird.
Anywho, long story short - the sort of games Sega has excelled at are generally not in style anymore. For those who appreciate that style, they are probably the best ever at what they did. Thats why there are still some of us out there who will go to bat for Sega - because they produced games really unlike any other game maker for a vast majority of their history. I honestly feel like Capcom, Konami, Nintendo... those companies are all very similar. Their output feels the same, they could merge into one super company and none of their output would really suffer. Sega was vastly different from those companies. Sega's closest competitor, and their most similar rival, would actually be Namco. Sega's rivalry with Namco is mostly forgotten today, but they were much more fierce rivals in terms of output than they were with Nintendo.
