User blog comment:King Flurry51/Why they should not use Gwen & Company again for the new season/@comment-4726418-20170512134425/@comment-4726418-20170517154914

Whether or not you like that Duncan merged in all of his seasons is irrelevant to the fact that they gave reasons as to why he lasted that long for storyline reasons and most importantly because he's much more straightforward of a character than Courtney, Lindsay, Tyler, or Noah. It's pretty easy to sum up his character and understand him, which is why him and Heather get the most episodes.

Also Duncan may have gotten the best placings but you're kind of ignoring how significant he really was for these seasons. In TDI he's more of a side role, occasionaly being really important every few episodes to balance things out. In TDA he's mainly focused on his interactions with Courtney and Harold, both of which develop more as characters than he does. In TDWT he returns and is important for really only four episodes, which is miniscule and besides that he was a supporting character. AS isn't even that bad because of the much shortened season, only giving him eight episodes.

Ok fair enough, he merged every time while Gwen and Heather sometimes didn't, but I'd really only argue for TDA he shouldn't have deserved to last as long as he did. TDI and TDAS are pretty self-explanatory because the former is his debut and the latter is a short season. And as for WT, the conflicts that sparked from that season all began because of his return. He was the main reason that season went from a comedy-heavy one with Alejandro lurking every now and again to being an actually well-written one. I don't have nothing against Tyler or Noah in WT but there was really no way you could give them much of a plot, especially with Duncan completely overshadowing them.

This is a pointless complaint to make anyway because the Big 5 are all going to keep coming back and people need to accept it. I want screentime for others but if everyone was on par with each other, getting to know people would get too complicated and you'd have to keep up with too many of them. The Big 5 serve as the more down to earth kinds of watching that are easy to view, regardless of someone's opinion on any of them.