I sort of disagree. In the beginning of Netflix they were releasing hit after hit in terms of artistic/innovative media. I think they had a very different approach, they were looking for special products but it is clear as they grew big they started focusing on cheap to make, low retention but high viral potentiality shows.

That's a business decision. They made a decision to go for quantity over quality, and that's fine for the short-term.

I think Netflix simply didn't find the right balance. It's okay to have cheap shows to fill in the blanks, I mean, I enjoy some of them. But the biggest problem is that they give up on pretty much every other more "artistic" work too easily; even when these can only become popular years later.

It was likely easier to pick up the products that were passed on by tv for various reasons when it was mainly TV and FX that were their competitors. Now there's quite a few more competitors for edgy quality content.

Well.. you kind of can? For at least as long as other providers are producing content you think is good. The creativity comes from humans who work somewhere; you can you can't buy creativity but you can 'buy' humans.

Also you can buy the rights to old good stuff. Might not make good business sense (some (weird! senseless!) people will only watch new stuff) but it'd please me. My favourite stuff's all older than I am (i.e. I don't think you can claim it's just fond childhood memory or whatever) and there's plenty of greats I've yet to see, why restrict myself to this year's crap (and perhaps hit or two).

Buying rights is more difficult with so many platforms banking on their own backlog of content. It locks up much of the highest quality content by making their owners think they can be Netflix too. (Some of them are right.)