I know the dinos are theme park monsters, but everything in Jurassic Park was believable in the context of what we knew at the time. It makes sense to continue those designs in the same universe. The dilos frill and spitting was made up, sure, but we could also say it was a possibility since there is so much we don't know, and never will know about dinosaurs.
What they're doing now however, is very different. They're not making some creative decisions to known dinosaurs, they're cooking up shit that never existed in order to create movie monsters. One time is justifiable from the story they were telling. Twice is a pattern and just makes me think they don't believe real dinosaurs are good enough for a dinosaur movie. Which is ridiculous.
There is so much oportunity here to do some amazing things. With the advancements 20 years of gene technology would have brought, they could create more correct dinosaurs. Spearheaded new knowledge. Made them awesome, and make all the feather haters realize how wrong they are.
But yeah, I have to agree with how sad it is we only have one dinosaur franchise. It's downright criminal.
Firstly, I do agree with you in many parts, particularly in that I'm not thrilled at the idea of continued straight up fully fictionalized monsters. My initial response was
largely in jest.
It is true though the differences are contextualized within the series, and even beyond that have always been a part of the franchise's DNA. The original Jurassic Park did generally strive for a level of accuracy that was far beyond its predecessors, but it was never exactly slavish in regards to absolute accuracy. I mean, the Velociraptors literally are Deinonychus renamed to sound more intimidating, and while large amounts of research were done into Deinonychus by Crichton and the filmmakers, their level of intelligence (which the franchise has presented as being internally accurate to and well-known aspect of the original species, not just something the scientists cooked up or a recent discovery by the park staff) is, and always has been, quite fictional. So I don't necessarily believe the franchise should aggressively pursue total accuracy to life.
That said, I'm definitely not for stagnation in accuracy or worse, net regressions, both of which I feel have occurred in some way or another throughout the franchise, and it's frustrating to see each film less concerned with it, when one of the driving impetuses of the original film was to bring audiences the most believable dinosaurs they've ever seen on screen. So while I don't believe accuracy should be the end-all, be-all for the franchise, I do believe it's something they need to do a much better job of working on. It's frustrating when, relative to the time each was created, Jurassic World is a big step back in accurate representations of these animals. And I do believe that focusing too much on purely fictionalized creatures creates a further divide from one of the franchise's original purposes and what it has become. It was a reasonably logical story progression once, but it shouldn't become the core focus of the story going forwards.
I actually think it would be an interesting progression to make the divide a much more central story element. It was lightly touched on in both Jurassic Park III ("theme park monsters" and "real scientists") and Jurassic World (Wu's speech on park attendee expectations trumping accuracy), but making it a core focus of a story would open up interesting opportunities. For instance, across both the novel and film canon there is the idea of InGen having multiple "versions" of each genome existing, with varying degrees of accuracy and hybridization (the current versions in the first novel being 3.0). Before we knew much about Jurassic World I thought it would be interesting to explore both Jurassic Park style (3.0) raptors and smaller, feathered raptors simultaneously being bred by InGen and having major roles on screen. This allows the classic, iconic versions to exist while also finally giving audiences a taste of the real deal. They wouldn't even have to be InGen creations either. InGen's been breeding dinosaurs for nearly three decades now, it makes sense that by this point competitors (BioSyn finally, perhaps?) would have cracked the process and began developing their own animals by now. You could easily have a competing company producing true-to-life creatures as an answer to InGen's heavily altered beasties.
Also, it definitely should be said that, in regards to Fallen Kingdom, we don't actually know how any hybrids would be utilized in the story. Perhaps they may be done in such a way that any fears and gripes may be unfounded. That said, it's certainly not impossible that they do overly focus on such creatures, but until we know for sure it may still be appropriate to hope for the best.