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Calling it a "moral of the story" sounds a bit preachy, but I generally feel like a story should have "said" something to you by the end of it. It doesn't even have to be an Aesop-tier lesson or anything like that. Like, yeah, sure, you get the typical kids' anime ones like "friendship and teamwork are important," but even something like "you know what? Robots are really awesome" counts as something too. It doesn't even have to be a clear moral, and it can maybe have multiple ideas mixed in together, but the real question is "what does this story leave you with in the end?"
The original Adventure was about many things, but one of them was that it was a story about embracing your own virtues, unlocking the hidden potential for goodness within yourself, and understanding the meaning of growing as a person. 02 was also about many things, but the main ones involved the importance of relationships and connections between people in order to grow together, and the meaning of redemption and making up for your mistakes.
tri. is about...the unfortunate reality of having to kill your friends sometimes? Or perhaps simply that life is hard? Trying to prove a point that Adventure and/or 02 is too idealistic? It's hard for any of these potential take-home messages to really resonate, because a good majority of the disasters in this series come from incomprehensible or irrational behavior. A plot that's full of "you could have avoided all this if you had just done something remotely reasonable" makes it hard to really feel like anything was taken out of it. If anything, in that case, "bad things happen when people are irrational and suddenly lose the ability to communicate"?
Moreover, this series actually has a genuine lack of originality in many aspects — Adventure and 02 had no shortage of dilemmas over pacifism vs. necessary fighting, mercy kills/friendly fire (02 especially was big on that one), collateral damage, morally ambiguous decisions with no clear answer, and issues of personal growth and self-care. A lot of what tri.'s staff has discussed with the sentiment of being new or innovative or pertinent to the kids' "maturity" in comparison to the original series...is a serious misreading of the original series that never actually shied away from such topics in the first place, and is a pretty insulting pigeonhole of it as "a show that doesn't touch complicated topics because it's for kids". And rather than expanding on these issues further, tri. comparatively feels like a series that takes some of the same concepts and injects a lot of needless shock value and angst and claims it's innovative and more "mature". Even when it does seem to inject original elements, they're not particularly original or innovative in the greater scope of the franchise; one of the major antagonists (Yggdrasil) is a cheap ripoff of a recurring franchise antagonist that had already overstayed their welcome even before 2015, and is reduced to a shell of depth of any notable incarnation of them within the rest of the franchise just so they can fill an obligatory villain role.
Ultimately, the vast majority of plot points in this series go unexplained or go absolutely nowhere. On principle, it's not necessarily an obligation for a series to resolve everything about itself; Adventure and 02 (the latter especially) both ended with a lot of unresolved parts, and in some aspects actually used that to its advantage for the sake of appeal (heck, Koushirou's entire future prospects depend on the fun of knowing there's still more to uncover). But when far too many of the fundamental front-and-center aspects of a story go nowhere, have no other positive side effects to contribute to the story, or seem to only be there for shallow shock value, and a large chunk of these unresolved plot points have largely to do with a flagrant disregard for or violation of known canon — none of which do anything to resolve the existing unresolved aspects of either original series, and in fact make them worse — the end result feels like not only a waste of time but also something that leaves the final state of canon in an even worse state than where it started. The reboot is probably the ultimate symbol of this, doing severe damage to the pre-established Adventure worldbuilding, canon, and timeline in one fell swoop, and not even putting an ounce of effort to address the implications of what it just did. In other words, reckless disregard and disrespect.
Adventure and 02 were not perfectly-written series, and were also prone to plot conveniences, contradictions (within themselves or between each other), unresolved plot points, and illogical swerves. If I were to make a similar workbook like this for those two series, there'd probably still be a fair share of colored marks everywhere. But despite all of it, they resonated with people because they were series with a lot of genuine heart, and, even if sometimes a bit too idealistic (again, not even nearly as much as they often get pigeonholed as), were there to entertain and ultimately be uplifting. A good chunk of anything overly convenient or illogical was part of an understanding of "okay, but it's more fun this way, so just roll with it." And even when both Adventure and 02 had unresolved plot points or poor/overly convenient explanations, they still treated the audience with enough respect to offer some kind of explanation at the base level (hamfisted or otherwise), rather than dropping something vague, refusing to give an explanation at all, and putting the burden on the audience to logically justify said vague and incoherent writing. As Adventure's first sequel, 02 was meant to respect and build off of Adventure and everything it had established, regardless of any faults it had, and the fact they were going for something with purpose is discernible even when you don't agree with the actual direction it went in. And pretty much any other Digimon TV anime series could be considered this, too — everyone's got their own favorites and ones they don't care as much for, and all of them have their good and bad parts, but there was always some degree of heart, creative ideas, and level of respect for their audience present in all of them.
This, in comparison, feels like a series so obsessed with showing off how "mature" it is that, through six movies of even less cohesive writing, it doesn't even have said heart going for it, and its severe lack of cohesiveness can't be passed under the "rule of fun" when it tries so hard to act like a "mature" and "serious" series (especially when said "lack of cohesiveness" comes largely from grossly flippant and reductive treatment of a rather beloved series before it). That's the real difference between Adventure/02 as a kids' series and tri. as one "for adults"; the former, even during its shakiest writing moments, was a series that emphasized heart and uplifting positivity over all else, whereas the latter seems to want to slap you in the face at every opportunity and lacks any actual writing consistency that would actually justify it. For all the 02 epilogue is controversial, it may have ended up a major saving grace in light of this series and the aftermath, because I seriously would not put it past this staff to have permanently killed off major characters, done further damage to the canon or universe, or gone even further off the rails for the sheer sake of shock value (because, you know, it's "mature") without an obligation to at least pretend they wanted to be compliant with the idealistic future portrayed there.
A lot of people tend to oversimplify what made Adventure so popular in the first place to just "good character development", but in fact Adventure was actually a mixture of several factors that made the entire thing work. Including, for instance:
tri., as a series, seems to have no awareness of these points, executes them poorly, or only performatively executes the surface details and none of the substance: