I agree on the decade jumps, totally. But, I disagree that the movies should try to be balanced. In fact, I think that is one of the biggest problems with this movie. So many characters all dividing up screen-time. Instead of trying to balance things so that sideline characters get their moments, they should just cut the sidelined characters. It is important to have character moments, but they should be the ones that the plot demands.
I disagree. So many of the characters were non-entities (Storm, Angel, Jubilee, Psylocke... even Jean didn't have any backstory prior to being at the school though she did have presence and substance). That's down to the editing removing lots of scenes in most cases.
You can't just cut ALL those characters (though Jubilee could have been cut completely) because the X-Men are a team who need more than one opponent to go up against. Therefore, there will need to be multiple characters in the movie.
In addition, Apocalypse always has his four horsemen, with Archangel typically among them and expected to be there. The only way around the challenge of characterising those four horsemen (and failing in this case, as Angel, Psylocke and Storm were not very well characterised) would be to scrap the four we got and instead keep the original horsemen from the opening sequence - they could have been entombed alongside Apocalypse and wake up with him. I don't think those original four would need much characterisation.
What happened was that Magneto got too much screentime (and spent the climax mostly hovering in his magnetic force bubble), while the other three were shafted. Lack of balance.
I would say that trying to balance the movies and give every character their moment would be a mistake.
The Russos and Civil War say hello with their $1 billion box office. They managed balance, they managed little scenes (Spider-Man, Black Panther) that gave motivation/personality to brand new characters.
This obsession with removing everything that doesn't drive the plot is only one technique of filmmaking, it's not the only way to do it - as the Russos' efforts show.
One user review on Box Office Theory nailed this:
"Remember those people who kept whining Singer didn't do X or Y mutant "justice" in the previous movies because they were sidelined in favor of a tighter focus? they basically won. Singer made this movie for them, for people who always disliked the X-Men movies, and as a result, we got the most episodic, messy, rushed, overstuffed and unfocused X-Men yet.
Well this is sheer nonsense, because Angel, Psylocke, Storm and Jubilee WERE sidelined. Jubilee should never have been in the script, the others should have been developed a little more (removing some of the other stuff with Magneto would have been easy, such as the Auschwitz scene).
Also, I had a big problem with the editing, you know when you feel the shot should have been a few seconds longer? that's basically the entire movie, never letting it breathe properly, I was like calm down for a bit."
The story was very disjointed, especially at the start, with all that flitting round the world. I think a problematic script is at the heart of it. An Extended Edition would go some way to sweeping away the complaints.
