I find them boring as hell and all 3 mentioned above look exactly the same to me
sure, but you are not my target market. And they are clearly not the same based on the different sales figures for each and how people prefer one over another (or none at all :-)) which imho wouldn't be too taxing
hoho, Holiday Bonus is 18,000 lines of code. There are a lot of little not-obvious mechanics and bits of code that have to be carefully tested and made just right for a match-3 to work. My prototype took a few days but I soon discovered more complex things that needed to be added and the rest of the game took months. Don't forget all the particle effects, screen transistions, menus, options, profiles, etc. - the list is very long. People often say they could make a match-3, but I don't see a string of "easy to make" games on their sigs...