User blog comment:Supermorff/Angry Joe interview for YJ: Legacy/@comment-432124-20120618030701/@comment-5188108-20120619163856

The team from season one are all still "young". They all still have growing up to do. Hitting 18 doesn't make you a complete, all-knowing being who shall remain the same way until death. Young adulthood is arguably one of the most important stages in a person's development. The time skip allows us to see them grow through what will undoubtedly be another key stage of development in their lives while also bringing forward a new group of younger heroes who, as well as being interesting in their own right, illuminate the similarities and differences in the old team by how they deal with characters in many ways not unlike their old selves.

Just because we aren't seeing continuous, consecutive growth across seasons doesn't mean we aren't seeing growth, or that the series is somehow being unfaithful to its core premise.

No, we haven't actually seen Robin grow into a leader and become Nightwing, Wally decide to leave the hero life, most of the new characters debut, etc but we know those things happened and we ARE seeing the consequences of those changes. That's more than we would be able to say of a second season set right after the first.

Add to that the fact there is an actual story being told (the show isn't just a character study) which is facilitated by the five year gap. I'm willing to bet that when we know the full details of what has been going on with the aliens the five years will have been necessary from a story standpoint. That is, we couldn't have simply had the events of this season 2 take place in early 2011 and still make sense. Would seeing the next 6-18 months following the end of season one be worth never finding out where the Light's plan was headed or what happened in the missing 16 hours?

If we had the luxury of infinite seasons then an argument could be made for missing out on things, but we don't. We have to accept the fact that we are not going to get to see everything. The writers have to prioritise the things we are shown in the limited time they have to show us.

The time-skip allows them to show us an older original team (who still have growing up to do!), to introduce new characters (who will be growing up), to follow up on the core story of season one (the Light's grand plan), and grants them storytelling advantages such as being able to surprise the audience by selecting when and how we learn about events in the gap (just as seaon one did with events that preceded the series) while still allowing them to tell stories within the gap via flashbacks, the comics and Legacy.

You can't please everyone and there will be some portion of the audience for whom the advantages of the skip are outweighed by their desire to see exactly what happens, as it happens to characters they care about. There's no way around that, but that doesn't make the time-skip a mistake or unnecessary.