No, he isn't, and anyone could have seen going back to about 2005 or so that the series was obviously at it's peak then, and that Kaz's desire to make himself the star of the series, the caretaker of the garden, was beginning to grow. Since then it has been ** ups after ** ups, whether it be the protracted cycle of trying to develop for a powerful, temperamental system in the PS3, the arduous development of GT5 that ended up with a game that was both filled with too much content, and having absolutely nothing that wasn't a few nice car models joined with lazy, uprezzed PS2 models, the lack of desire to pivot the series when Forza was swiping players left and right with good games and giving fans features they actually wanted, GT6 basically being sent to die when it should have been a launch title on the PS4, GT Sport being a wholly reactionary title that alienated fans and absolutely didn't bring them back when they pivoted back cynically to a somewhat 'classic' GT single player suite, and now.
Frankly, more then anything else, I truly believe that the market has passed by GT, and it's certainly not going to have a casual fanbase any more after this debacle, certainly not the kind of casual fanbase who have been buying GT games since 5 as simply rolling tech and graphic demos. More then anything else, people on this forum, who could probably be best described as sim racers, are either happy and satisfied with the games that they are getting now on consoles which do racing so much better then GT has ever done since 4, or are on PC where the options are truly unlimited.
But really, I feel like the real fly in the ointment is what Kunos is going to do with Assetto Corsa 2. AC is without question the modern day GT in terms of cars and tracks that can be offered on the PC side, and it's modularity, and ease of that modularity, makes it easy to recommend to anyone even slightly interested in sim racing games. We know that AC2 is being worked on, but I truly believe that Kunos have a massive opportunity to provide a true revolution in the racing game genre where it has had none in the past two decades or so. Provide easy to work on frameworks for more natural free-roam maps - something the AC modding community is already doing, but could be made easier with the things that Kunos has learned from that community in the close to decade AC has been on the market. But more importantly, offer an easy frame work for a more set in stone career mode slash single player suite - and specifically, the Car-PG structure that GT has leaned on. There's already a mod out there that is trying to build a GT style experience within Assetto Corsa - and even in an alpha state, it surely looks more of a GT game then whatever the hell Polyphony tried to do with GT7. Even if it doesn't have the polish that Polyphony has (which means jack nowadays considering what that polish is eventually going towards) it's being done by one person, and it goes to show that people shouldn't underestimate a resourceful community, especially on the PC side.
If that's the case? Then GT as a franchise is dead in the water right there and then. Moreover, I can very easily tell that Forza and Turn 10 especially are using GT7's failures as a guiding star in how not to create future Forza's, and especially on how not to create a live service game if that's the route they decide to take.
More then anything else, it might be high time for Kaz to get out of the echo chamber he surrounds himself in, and start realizing the competition isn't simply just Forza anymore. It's certainly passed him by long ago, and GT is not the series it once was. If it wants to return to prominence (IF more like) then they need to put in the work in order to make a better game out of GT7, and prove to the community they won't lie anymore to their faces. But considering how it's gone now, where they basically told another bald face lie to the community's faces in that he doesn't want people to buy into MTX's while also changing the in game economy to more or less serve that or untenable grinding as the ways to play the game legitimately, they're already off on the wrong foot.
