I'd say that random people, if they reuse a copyrighted material, are a lot more likely to veer far off the beaten path than the big studios.

Fan fiction, even if building on previous materials, seems to be much less repetitive to me.

Sure.

Your point was studios recycle IP a lot.

My point is without copyright studios would recycle it even more.

And your point now is that it would be higher quality.

My main point was that they recycle lazily, producing slop before the name even existed. Not every adaptation is lazy, I'd say that Odyssey is quite good, even though the original work is 100 generations old.

Just imagine how much slop they could make if licensing wasn't holding them back