Realistically I reckon the main point of interest with Stadia from a design perspective is being able to figure out ways to build games that can offset the many, many question marks and drawbacks you would get from having to make a game for a cloud-based platform. Whether or not it's more challenging or not than straight up making a game for a regular PC isn't something I'd know myself, but the questions that Stadia raises propose interesting hurdles for designers and producers to sort of get past.
Even if you approach the PS3 from the angle that the Cell was kind of shit, for it's time I reckon the challenge of having to wrap their heads around new architecture may be exciting. It may not necessarily be convenient, but I see the argument from a design perspective as to why that may be stimulating. Something like loading times for instance; which I imagine almost every developer had to think of ways across all generations to minimize one way or another. It's brand new hardware with brand new rules, and even if the answer may end up being a cumbersome one moving forward, that doesn't mean that initial excitement was misplaced.
So going into the next gen, knowing that the architecture is basically the same, yeah, from a pure specs front there's not much to chew on unless they come with some kind of new and exciting hook to it, like a new controller method or something. As it stands they're basically continuing off from where they are currently. That's not necessarily a bad thing for convenience's sake obviously, but convenience doesn't always translate to excitement. Plus, there's something to be said about how Platinum obviously isn't the size of Naughty Dog, so they won't necessarily benefit from the hardware change as much as other studios. The higher up the ladder you go, the more only a select few devs will be able to find that sheer horsepower liberating in a sense of doing things they were previously unable to do. For Platinum, I think the best we'll end up looking at is a resolution bump.
