I'm well aware that fan memory of Ultima 9's legacy is still in contention. But I'm always amazed at how much the series as a whole changed between installments. If I'm not mistaken, Origin even had this strange rule about writing everything from scratch with every release. So I wonder: how did the community take in all design innovations between U4 and U9? Was it always a warm reception or were there proto codexers, already speaking of Decline past the Quest of Avatar?
That's a good question, one that was tangentially brought up in some discussions I had on the Ultima Codex a few years ago. Unfortunately, most of the series was released before the Internet became widely available so there's no record of this, only hearsay. If you look at the earliest posts in newsgroup archives, you can find some contemporary rage about Ultima VIII, but AFAIK the community was pretty much united in its hatred for that, so no civil war. Ditto for Ultima IX, its modern day rehabilitators notwithstanding.
I can't imagine there weren't people who were pissed off that Ultima VII went real-time, or that Ultima VI dropped the classic tiled look and dual-scale map, but their laments are lost in time, like tears in rain. All I know is that by the time I became part of the community in the mid-90s, nobody was talking about that.
Actually I'd contest the community hatred being united on U8. Internet was around then, but the debate was on alt.games.ultima (or whatever it was called, that's my memory of it, but there was definitely an ultima-specific newsgroup and a separate crpg-newsgroup with heavy ultima fandom).
I hated it, because the fucking thing corrupted my hard drive. Twice. Ok, the second time was my fault, because the computer techie (I borrowed my father's computer techie, well not his employee but the guy he used to come out and do computer techie stuff at his business) warned me the 1st time that U8 was the cause, and I didn't-believe-sort-of-half-hoped-didn't-want-to-believe him, and ended up binning a 2nd hard drive because of it.
But there was praise for the magic system, and after the patches removed the platformer elements, the game itself. It was different to previous ultima games, but continued the tradition of being nothing like anything else around, and felt like it was pushing things forward in a sense - some steps backwards too, but definitely not a popamolisation.
The main long-term complaint was actually thematic, not gameplay. You had the Avatar doing all these horrible things to survive - things totally against everything he stood for - but in a world that isn't that of the rest of the series, eventually leaving that world as it's destroyed and escaping to the main world.
There were two camps regarding that, each with good reasons. It's the kind of instalment that turns heavily on what they do in the next 'episode'. Having the Avatar face a world where the Guardian reigns supreme, where everything he fears could happen to the main ultima world has already happened and he has to do terrible shit to survive because this is a world where the virtues were never saved, where there was no great avatar or Lord British to pull it from corruption (imagine the world of U1-3 continuing onwards, without U4-7) is an interesting concept. But whether or not it's a betrayal of the Ultima values, or a fantastic chapter that shows how critical those values are, i.e. it shows exactly what the world has to lose if the Avatar fails in U9, depends entirely on U9 providing a satisfactory pay-off. That never happened, but simultaneously, U9 was butchered in a way that we'll never know whether U8's 'do-whatever-it-takes' win requirements were brilliant or face-palm-stupid.