Yes but the problem is that for some time there has been pretty much nothing but dark stories. Personally I find it very disingenuous to write a story in which people constantly stab each other in the back (with the repercussions of that tending to be quickly swept under the carpet) and then pretend they are still great friends. Trying to have it both ways is rarely a good idea. I am sure that many of the fans who loved the Scooby friendships dropped the show at some point when it became clear that Joss had no interest whatsoever in such things any more, enthralled in his "darkly mature" stories and in pandering to shippers. For me having characters with the depth of a stamp like Anya and Andrew go back and forth between dark and "good" isn't exactly a compelling story. Neither is that of Faith, the poster child for a cliché bad girl.
Rehashing the same situations doesn't really help either - oh, look Buffy/Angel/Wesley/Willow/Xander/Cordelia slept with a demon (or a human villain). Been there, done that. Also, I think it takes a lot more talent to write a story with lots of conflict and drama without always turning things into "one of the good guys becomes evil". Look at Wesley's arc in S3 of AtS - there is plenty of conflict without turning Wes into a moustache-twirling villain similar to Dull Willow. Or The yoko Factor, Dead Man's Party, When She Was Bad, etc - a lot of angst without anybody being perfectly right or anybody being monstrously bad. Joss seems to have been trying to repeat the success of the Angel storyline of BtVS S2 ever since he wrote it, but with ever more diminishing returns. The suspense has totally disappeared because every fan by now knows that the "evil" characters will not face much punishment and will be "redeemed". And the get out of jail cards Joss is so prone to giving are also at odds with his claims of being a writer of mature dark stories. People like David Simon ("The Wire") write such stories, Joss these days writes wish-fulfilment trash where if you are one of the important characters you can literally get away with anything, up to and including trying to destroy the world. Sorry if this sounds too harsh, but that's my opinion on the matter.
