The Harvest Moon games were also all dating sims. The main thing Stardew Valley does is have like 20x as much content and variety as a Harvest Moon game with significantly fewer bugs or abandoned concepts. And the Harvest Moon games were already great as they were. But yeah, if you literally rolled every single Harvest Moon game feature into a single Harvest Moon game, it would still come up short against Stardew Valley. And it was made primarily by one dude that charged way less than any single Harvest Moon game for it.
For the purposes of this comment “Harvest Moon games” refers to the ones made by the real Harvest Moon team, that eventually moved on to “Story of Seasons” when their franchise name was stolen from them. And also includes Rune Factory.
The worst part is he’s accelerating towards it so hard that half, or more, of the frogs are going to jump out of the boiling pot. And they will have a civil war at the same time as starting WW3… so they will also lose WW3.