Q u o t e: the best companies in our lifetime will be smart enough to learn from their mistakes, as well as mistakes of other companies.
Regretfully, it seems that even the best companies are primarily learning from their own mistakes, and that they even got a rather short memory.
Hopefully, I'm wrong. But I'm personally seeing so many discrepancies in today's games. Sort of an all-out focus on technology that they lose complete track of the plots themselves. Or basically anything that isn't technology-based. This is one of the reasons why I'm introducing the concept of Venturography, and other things that I've researched about games and the industry for the last 10 years.
It's also one of the reasons I love Blizzard. I mean, I do see crap in Blizz-games as well, but the important thing is not whether you find bad things or not - but what sorts of bad things you see. You do have a finite amount of time producing a game, so it'll never be perfect. But there are ways to identify and focus on the things that need to be good, and then sacrifice the things that people won't mind being bad.
Age of Conan, for instance, could've actually become an incredible game that could kick WoW's ass, if only Funcom knew how to make games - which they don't!