After seeing other games implement the same ideas better, I can't stand WoD and I can't stand its undeserved market dominance.
I mean, "undeserved market dominance" is basically the main theme of the tabletop RPG industry. Being better-designed, more accessible, cheaper, having better art and so on have all proven pretty weak against first-mover advantage and the sheer difficulty of getting people to try a new system or learn about a new setting, however good.
This is why D&D has 50m players and all other systems probably don't have half of that.
White Wolf's decisions with WoD were somewhat idiosyncratic, but also very on-brand for the early 1990s. Personally I like the ecoterrorist werewolves, as it gives them a more interesting deal than most werewolves, but plenty of people didn't like the ever-thinning blood or the luddite-ish read of the Traditions (which not all of them are but is definitely a theme). Its dominance was far more earned than that of D&D, though - it basically had to fight uphill, and succeeded to the point where it nearly overtook (or even did overtake) 2E AD&D at some points in the 1990s, largely by a combination of utterly nailing this early '90s zeitgeist, great art, and sufficiently accessible rules (unlike so many games of the era). The rules weren't good, but they were pretty easy-to-use, and produced results that made sense, which is all you could really ask back then. Actually another major factor is that WoD got a lot of people into RPGs who weren't necessarily already into RPGs (particularly women), which made it a lot easier for it to expand its market share - it didn't have to try and convert/cannibalize existing RPG players.
Re: Everlasting, it failed because it wasn't cool. Conceptually, it had a lot of good ideas, but it was just not cool/stylish/appealing. IIRC it also had a slightly pain-in-the-arse system. Even if it had first-mover over WoD it would have failed, I'd suggest.
WitchCraft was a bit more on-brand to a later-90s, post-The Craft, post-Buffy landscape. I think it had the potential to do really well, and it's Unisystem like AFMBE (indeed it's where Unisystem comes from) - which was basically what you were describing re: an Urban Fantasy genre-specific system. It's still somewhat naive in that it remains basically simulationist rather than having adopting narrative conventions, but later Unisystem games (like when they did an actual Buffy game) do on-broad some narrative ideas. I think the things that stopped it being as big were first off, WoD already existed, secondly, WoD had a slightly more accessible system, esp. for people new to RPGs (the dot-based stuff in WoD was possibly-accidental genius for people unfamiliar with RPGs and intimidated/repulsed by numbers), and thirdly WitchCraft was witch-centric, which was quite zeitgeist-y but limited the audience. That said, Unisystem did do well, as non-D&D, non-WoD RPGs go. The moved a lot of books, esp. with the Buffy and Angel licenses. Reading them now is kind of a trip because I'd forgotten the system and assumed it would be narrative-ish, as would naturally fit both shows, but it's much closer to a "trad" RPG.
Nightlife I'm only limitedly familiar with, but by 1991, even, it seemed like something that belonged to an earlier generation. I remember looking at it around then and thinking "Wow, this is for old, lame people". It failed to "nail the zeitgeist" in the way WoD did, and instead seemed tacky and '80s in a bad way (where even VtM 1E never seemed "80s").
Feed is much more recent and takes a frankly rather avant-garde approach to things, that will obviously never have the broad appeal of something like a WoD game. Most RPG players don't want to have to make up the setting, and make a lot of decisions about how they work, and so on. The audience for non-pre-packaged stuff is just much smaller.
I guess what I'm saying is WoD's popularity is somewhat undeserved, but not entirely. The fact that it targeted people who didn't already play RPGs, and the fact that they made something both accessible and zeitgeist-y both matter. There was a very low barrier to entry, relative to almost all these other games. Oh and it's got an absolute ton of lore for people to read when they're not playing - this is a huge asset to the long-term success of an RPG as an IP, I'd suggest.
Feed provides a humanity mechanic that is vastly superior to any edition of WoD, because it doesn't operate on the unfun premise of "you go crazy for doing bad things." It operates a lightside/darkside premise, where you lose human traits and replace them with vampire traits.
I think the Humanity deal in VtM (and even VtR) is one of the biggest weaknesses of the game, and just something they've never properly dealt with (maybe they did in 5E, I admit I haven't read it). It is an unfun premise, and the way it's implemented in all editions of VtM (except maybe 5E) doesn't really fit well with either themes of the setting, the themes of vampire media, or y'know, basic common sense, because we're humans, we know what makes us more monstrous. "Vandalism" in the broad sense, for example, ain't it, for example - I mean, in VtM, you help pull down a statue of some evil-doer (even Saddam Hussein or w/e), even if you're literally helping humans do it, and you're making a Humanity check. Whereas if you were vandalizing someone's house to terrify them, obviously that would make sense. Humanity, as implemented, is both unfun, doesn't quite fit the setting, and is just kinda stupid.
VtM did start to experiment with the "Vampire traits" thing with the Paths in 2E (for Sabbat mainly, but not entirely), which were vampire ways of thinking (IIRC at least one was grotesquely racist but that's a whole other discussion) that replaced Humanity as your "sanity anchor" as it were. However they usually turned into "The Path of What I Was Going To Do Anyway" as someone memorably put it, and so didn't work as well even as Humanity.
Hope you're not apologising for your post btw, I enjoyed reading it a lot! I wish I had more to say re: shapeshifters, but that's never been my area of expertise.
