What lightning? I think the “same old song and dance” was never adequately explored. Blizzard just breezed through it while focusing almost entirely on Raynor and Kerry at the expense of the setting.
The SC1 manual setup an interesting complicated multilayered conflict that might last many years. The games breezed through those plot points without ever really examining them.
The Umoja and Moria resentment toward Confederacy? Never explored.
The Ara and Akilae arguing over whether to genocide the terrans? Never brought up.
The zerg hunting humanity for the determinant? All that importance moved to Kerry.
The complex cultures teased for the terran squadrons, zerg broods and protoss tribes? Never explored, and the zerg leaders were killed off screen.
The schism between the khalai and nerazim? Breezes through in a handful of missions with a couple paragraphs of dialogue at most.
The terrans fighting back against the protoss in vengeance for the protoss glassing inhabited world and killing countless innocents? Never mentioned once in the series, despite genocide being hugely important in reality.
The SC1 premise could easily have fueled many many years worth of stories, perhaps forever. Blizzard squandered it from the onset and nothing they did since has ever approached a fraction of the potential they squandered.
The three races teaming up against an endless stream of one-note villains coming out of the woodwork will get stale fast. Team up to destroy Earth, hooray! Then Amon’s ex-girlfriend, then Ouros’ mom, then some new terran/zerg/protoss faction that always existed but was never mentioned until now, then a race that created the xel’naga, then Kerry’s evil twin, etc.
At least if the Overmind was the status quo you could actually play as the villains trying to eat humanity. But apparently the coddled modern generation can’t handle playing morally ambiguous characters, much outright villains with literally alien motives. Even if you’re playing space bugs whose purity of essence makes them horrific monsters by definition, the developers shoehorn you into an unambiguous heroic role for the sake if your fragile moral compass.
One can only hope that the constant writer turnover in the company means that we’ll get a halfway decent story at some point, even if that takes another twenty years and forty more war chests with thirty new protoss tribes, thirty new zerg broods, and thirty new terran factions pulled out of the woodwork.