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I've personally never seen what the major appeal is for these shows. The fans of course will argue "The Japanese versions are better!" But I found them equally silly. I think it's these kind of shows which make it hard for Americans to take serious live action Japanese scifi films like the original GOJIRA seriously.
Seriously though...the Super Sentai genre is basically the Japanese equivalent of American superhero TV shows/films like X-MEN. Same idea. The MASKED RIDER show, for example, has also been around for decades, probably even longer than Super Sentai. And of course, who can forget ULTRAMAN, which sort of marked a starting point for this "boom" (definitely a monster of the week setup for that show). They've all gone through a billion incarnations and stuff and still have hardcore fanbases even to this day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamen_Rider
Likewise, the scholars of tokusatsu (Japanese SPFX shows) usually radically defend them and argue that Americans just don't get 'em.
What does this have to do with POWER RANGERS? Tokusatsu fans generally argue that POWER RANGERS is a piss poor Americanization of this genre. All the creators of POWER RANGERS basically did was take the fight scenes and costumes from the Japanese shows and throw in American actors, dialogue, stories, and music for the dramatic parts. It's the same thing they did to the original GOJIRA in 1956, except worse!
While tokusatsu fans might be right in their defense of the Japanese originals, it's also clear that a lot of these shows were made for kids in the first place. So if you thought the subject matter of POWER RANGERS was very silly, then I don't think watching the Japanese version would make you think that differently. As much as it changes, POWER RANGERS is still just a translation of the same genre. So personally, I didn't see THAT much difference in quality. For example, maybe the actors are better, but it's kind of hard to tell because the actors in the Japanese shows are also young teens.
Like I said, I have not seen a lot of these shows, so I haven't been able to follow their trends and don't know a lot about which ones are good or bad. Like American superhero shows, they've had their ups and downs, so it's not really possible to gauge what a modern show would be like from watching a show in the 60's. You'd really have to go to an expert of this stuff to figure it out. I do understand they've tried to get darker and more serious as the years go by, but I'm not sure if the genre has ever produced a franchise with the depth and sophistication of something like WATCHMEN. But I do trust that out of the hundreds of TV shows to be produced in this genre, there has to be something good out there. It's tough to discuss this stuff blind.
I also know there's some pretty big differences to the American and Japanese versions of Power Rangers and the like, and even after sampling a little of the Japanese originals, they don't look that much better.
When I meant "creative," I mostly meant with storylines because so many of these types of shows have the "monster of the week" formula that I have little tolerance for. Perhaps if these shows were instead restricted to movies or a TV miniseries, then the plot formula would probably stay relatively fresh.
Re: "creativity". Right, it gets old after a while. That's why it's always put me off. Like I said...despite the enormous popularity of the genre, I still have not encountered a franchise that has tried to do something new and challenging with it ala WATCHMEN or even the new BATMAN films. But I'm not into it, so I don't know. Or maybe the "sophisticated" scifi manga and anime make up for that deficiency. I don't know.