dtgreene: To me, it feels as though the years you chose were some of the weakest:
* As I mentioned, Baldur's Gate and Final Fantasy 7 ruined most CRPG branches.
* Entire genres became endangered. In particular, there's an extreme lack of 2D platformers from that era. In fact, you even have game companies like Sony of America having explicit rules against 2D games. (With that said, 2D platformers were overdone (on consoles, at least) before then; it's just that they suddenly became nearly extinct (outside of handhelds), with only a few, like Yoshi's Story and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, coming from that era.)
* Also notable is the lack of turn-based games. On PC, it felt like every game had to be real-time in some way, which severely hurt the WRPG genre. On consoles, if you look at the JRPGs there, there's thing like action commands and minigames, not to mention obsession of wasting storage space with FMV videos that do nothing for the gameplay.
* Speaking of which, consoles lost what I felt was the main technical advantage they had over PCs; the lack of load times.
* It also felt like this is when so many games coddled the player. FF7, for example, felt way too easy.

The industry did recover, in terms of game design (ignoring the DRM issue), coming out of it. Cave Story released as freeware in 2004, leading to the revival of the platformer genre. (There's also the metriodvania/adventure hybrid La Mulana, releasing just a few years later.) It looks like turn based WRPGs didn't really recover until 2014 (Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2 released that year).