To be honest, I have never cared about keeping a tally of system generations or about their numbering. If you refer to a generation as the #-th generation, most of the time I'm just going to scratch my head and then have to Google which is which. Maybe it's a little more cumbersome, but I much prefer to refer to things as say, the 8-bit era, the 16-bit era, the 32/64-bit era, the PS2/GC/Xbox era, etc. If I want to talk about pre-crash gaming, then I'll say exactly that ("pre-crash gaming"); I'm not going to lump all the systems together in the same "generation" as if the Odyssey was a contemporary to the Colecovision.

The way these generations have been split up is questionable. I have always found it peculiar how the Colecovision is made out to be so distant and separate from the NES when, not only are early NES games not far off from how the average Colecovision game looks and plays, but they were released only one year apart (Colecovision in '82, Famicom in '83). I find that this whole numbered generation system is very Western-centric, wanting to go off of the US release dates for Japanese systems, and thus has produced a skewed vision of the industry, and where it was technology-wise, worldwide, as a whole.