Special Stage

So I was watching S2e6 of What If...? and it got me wondering about how supposedly "rare" the Chaos Emeralds are meant to be.

Presuming Sonic's Earth is the same size and land ratio as ours, the Chaos Emeralds are roughly the size of a tennis ball and there's only seven of them, which are scattered across the four corners of the world. While an individual Chaos Emerald is not as powerful as the whole collective set, each emerald is still a source of great power and a sort of honey pot of mystery, power and temptation which can influence and change a culture just by their presence alone.

Yet whenever Dr. Eggman enacts an evil scheme, the Chaos Emeralds are either already collected by him or just so happen to be scattered nearby. Either found at the end of local action stages or scattered around neighbouring adventure fields or town stages.

Doesn't it sort of dampen their value if they can just be found rummaging around the local neighbourhood or just outside of town? Heck, while Mystic Ruins is depicted as a vast jungle and Station Square as a sprawling metropolis, we only got to explore less than a mile of each of these places where the Chaos Emeralds just so happen to be found.

How I would fix this:

• While Special Stages are canon, they're no longer mentioned or brought up in mainstream Sonic games. Put more lore around where the Special Stages are located. Let it be a "rule" that the reason why Sonic can't keep the Chaos Emeralds after being Super Sonic is because after extensive use they vanish and end up back in the Special Stages.

• Let the dimension of the Special Stages not be linear to time outside the dimension. When the Chaos Emeralds are within the Special Stages, they're up for grabs at any point in Earth's history. The Chaos Emeralds may even scatter to any point in time on Earth. Chaos Emeralds are still inanimate objects that appear resilient to erosion, so whenever an emerald is recovered now and an older emerald is unburied later doesn't matter as long as you have two emeralds.

• You could say it's "fate" for Sonic to come across the Chaos Emeralds whenever he needs them to stop Dr. Eggman and/or to save the world. I don't like this because it makes the word "chaos" somewhat moot. If the Chaos Emeralds need some sort of ulterior will or sentience on when Sonic needs them, have Tikal or Chaos as the patron saint of the Chaos Emeralds. Or the Master Emerald having prophetic powers that influences where the Chaos Emeralds show up.

• Why not more stories around the individual Chaos Emeralds? The only story we have of how a single Chaos Emerald affected an individual's life is Big the Cat. Why not more stories of people coming across a Chaos Emerald and how these emeralds influenced their lives?

What if we got to see the movie-adaption of the "Special Zone"? Or wherever you believe the Special Stages in Sonic games take place.

Like rings can only be found in this realm where both creation and destruction is constant. But rings can be found throughout this place, therefore only advance civilizations with the efficient technology can reach them. Perhaps the Chaos Emeralds ended up in this place after Sonic 2.