And the waterfall transparency trick doesnt make the entire game look bad.

No, it really does. Again I have a model 2 genesis (the one with better video than the model 1, lol) and its composite video is still basically atrocious. It’s probably some of the worst composite this side of the NES, it looks incredibly soft and is full of that rainbow fringing and whatever. When you could instead be playing hooked up via component or RGB or something, why trash the video sigbal for a single visual effect??

And while it’s true that the majority of MD/Genesis systems were hooked up via RF, even, (awful, I die) Sonic 1 was also commonly seen in arcades, which would have been an RGB monitor in a Sega approved release…

The sprites are clearly drawn by skilled hands but with flaws that even a newbie would avoid on a modern monitor.

Really? I never considered the spritework to be a point of criticism in the Sonic games… also do LCDs have artifacting? Plus iirc Liquid Crystal Displays did not exist at all in 1991, the first ever LCD TV was introduced by Sharp in 1992 (for the Japan only MUSE system) and they wouldn’t become affordable until the late 1990s. By contrast all PAL TVs had SCART basically…

As a bonus shitfact, the Sega Terradrive, a combo Mega Drive/IBM PC, also had an RGB connection to its monitor ✨