At this point I see Wizards literally increasing the number of universes beyond even more. The number of sets coming out every year is ridiculous though. Powercreep out the window.
It's a sad state of affairs. The older stories were really interesting. I'm not going to pretend keeping a cohesive storyline intact over three decades is easy, but I'm allowed to be frustrated by the Marvel-ification of both the writing and design in the past few years. And I'm not nearly as into the lore as others.
Conversely, UB is easy. You don't have to come up with anything new, just adapt already existing media to the game system. People have been doing that on their own for years, myself included. Wizards simply decided that it was worth trying an official version to see how much money was in it. It was the next logical step after official alters/skins of 3rd party IPs. After all, people pay artists good money to draw on their cards, why not see how much money you can make with officially licensed alters of already existing cards?
Overall UB was inevitable given MTG is one of Hasbro's only IPs that's capable of printing money. I'm only mad because of how poorly it has been handled. One simple fix from the beginning was all it took to keep nearly everyone happy: make mechanically unique UB cards silver bordered. Casuals can still play with them, collectors can still collect them, and they don't interfere with the feeling and balance of tournament play.
Universes Within is a good compromise but shouldn't be necessary.
Power creep is a different beast. A little bit over time is necessary because without it the meta will be solved and the game will get stale. However, too much too fast and you end up like a physical gacha game where every new release is noticeably better than the last. That's too chaotic and makes people burn out.
Balancing power creep has to be one of the hardest things in any game that receives regular updates. If you scale back the power in response to going too far too fast, like Homelands and Fallen Empires were a response to Urza's block, people tend to hate it and it sells poorly. WOTC used to be good at managing it, imo until about 2019 when WAR came out, but a faster power creep tends to make more money so here we are.
