I’m no longer thinking “holy shit, what’s going to happen?”

I’m thinking “yeah, okay, here comes the thing they always do.”

I have always assumed that this is a universal experience. Once you have consumed enough media, everything just seem so obvious.

So I would tend to prefer a unique premise over a recycled one.

Sometimes it actually works.

My experience is less of a epiphany like your’s. In my case, the execution / story-telling of some anime is so awesome that the story being cookie-cutter didn’t matter.

That’s why my method for finding anime nowadays isn’t to seek recommendations, but to go down the list of top-rated anime.