>>55753762This.
Once you get out of the magic spell that the blue dorito had over you as being the "only" place in vtubing worth watching (and their horrid stagnation and lack of momentum in '22, with talents being bitchy or on break plus the whole Tempiss disaster, gave everyone plenty of opportunity to look around elsewhere), you realize the landscape is bigger and includes other offerings that you might even like better instead of just sticking slavishly to the limited HoloEN selection like a braindead brand drone.
Don't misunderstand this as hating, there's still some value in things that only Hololive can really provide, for example if you're enjoying big hype events then yeah obviously HL is the unrivaled place to be. Or the sheer size of their fan community which provides a mass of people to connect and talk to about the talents, and produces a steady stream of quality fan content to enjoy, so you're always getting fed something at least.
But as far as pure basics, regular talent, "am I really enjoying this random gaming stream #8342 anymore?" goes, most of the HoloEN girls aren't really all THAT special, and arguably hard-carried by the brand buff and would just be unremarkable 2views in a sea of thousand others without it. Case in point, many HoloEN talents WERE unremarkable 2views before receiving the golden ticket which suddenly transformed them into the greatest things since sliced bread, while they are doing pretty much the same boring stuff as before as far as regular streams go, and the only difference is just access to the HL ecosystem and resulting "prestige" that rubs off from it.
But for basic qualities like regular "entertainment quality", being able to carry a stream on your own merits, being funny, cute, charming or having good community engagement, there are talents in the smallcorpo/indie sphere that do these things just as well or arguably even better. I don't even need to list them, because everyone's taste is different, but that's exactly the point - the selection of possible talents that fit your specific tastes better than the limited selection offered by HoloEN is just so much wider outside the box, so if you shop around you probably won't take long to find someone or more to like.
Of course, disregard all that if you're perfectly happy with HL's current offerings. No point in trying to change your opinion, and I hope you continue enjoying yourself. But if you're at all unhappy, bored or unfulfilled with it, you don't HAVE to stay married to a big corpo out of some misplaced emotional investment sense of "obligation", if you aren't really enjoying it fully anymore. They don't really care about you, so why should you care about them? It's all just entertainment in the end, and just like you change the channel if you're not enjoying a TV show anymore, you can look around for other vtubers instead.
