fair enough. i don't see it being a worrying trend though, or something new for the Tomb Raider series, which was criticised for adding too much action to it's very first sequel back in 1997.
the story was praised in its debut for being cinematic. trying to be more cinematic may make the game seem more like others here in 2013, but again, it's nothing new for the franchise.
the franchise hasn't been innovative since 1996, but that hasn't stopped a lot of those sequels from being good. when it aped Sands of Time platforming with Legend, for example... that made it a better game.
if I saw this as a worrying trend, as you may do, then I might be concerned by it, but gaming is only creatively stifled if you look at games which have budgets in multi millions... and those are always going to have to go after sales.
True, I don't disagree with that.
By TR 4, the series was basically an action game with hordes of enemies in industrial landscapes. Crystal Dynamics dialed the series back but they modernized other aspects, like the tedious jump backs from the edge of ledges. I don't recall of people called that the "dumbing down" of Tomb Raider at the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Then again, Core had trampled the series into the ground so much by that point that maybe they were just happy to see someone else take the reigns. I know I was.
My only point is that I really really get suspicious when any game becomes "evidence" in the crusade against the "dumbing down" of games. It's like everything that happened to the series previously gets crammed into this procrustean narrative of the trajectory of modern game design. It rings false to me and it is my first sign that people aren't even talking about the game itself but abstracting to some meta-narative they have developed about the industry as a whole. Hey, the original Tomb Raider series became more and more "action oriented." was that also proof of the dumbing down of games back in 1999? Lobbying some meta-narrative of the direction of the game industry on any one particular game is not a fair thing to do and it often results in a highly skewed picture of reality.
The original TR games undoubted borrowed a lot from games that came before them too. It borrowed heavily from Prince of Persia. It stole lock on mechanics from other games and made us all wish it would have stolen cameras from Legend of Zelda. Borrowing aspects of other games is not something new to the series. Nor is it automatically proof in favor of some meta-narrative about the homogenization of videogames. It is how it incorporates the elements it borrows that matters.
I'm not saying that the earlier history of Tomb Raider is some kind of perfect holy grail - far from it. As plagiarize and you perfectly put it, it is a mainstream series that covered many of its contemporary genres, such as PoP and Mario64. And this could probably be argued in many other cases of the recent examples of games changing direction to have a broader appeal.
However, I think you're basing too much of your "shoe-horning of this example into a meta-narrative of the games industry becoming homogeneous" claim on how the history of a series has devolved. Whether or not Hitman was once Game B and turned into Game A, or if Tomb Raider was once Game C and turned into Game A does not counter-argue that developers and publishers are more risk-averse than ever and larger budgets demand extremely safe game design.
What I am trying to get at is that mainstream games have become bigger, budgets are bigger, risks are much higher, tried-and-true methods are preferred rather than experimentation, game marketing is carefully planned and targeted towards predictable demographics, developers and so on. Many industry persons and studios have corroborated this trend.
As for the narrative disconnect, I don't mind having that discussion and I think it is an interesting one. But I also think it is a criticism that can be lobbied at virtually 80% of the games on the market if not more. It seems highly disingenuous to me to cherry pick this as the game that deserves to be beaten up on that principle. I also don't see how this wasn't also a problem with every previous TR game. Lara was always a mass murderer from game one. Does it really matter in terms of narrative disonance whether we are talking about hundreds of people or a thousand?
I also think it's an interesting topic, but I don't think the fact that because "80%" of games employ this disconnect excuses its existence. If I encounter it, I'm going to call it out, no matter what game it is. Even if a series has a history of suffering from ludonarrative dissonance.
Moreover, there are nuances in the ludonarrative dissonance debate. Games that rely heavily on characterization, themes, or dramatic impact need to have a coherent game experience between the ludic and narrative aspects, whereas games with less emphasis on its narrative can more likely get away with a jarring disconnect between the two aspects. Thus the former type of games are much more open to criticism, while the latter is more excused.