This. Right. Here. I go to a music school, and practically all of my teachers encourage us to take whatever standards we are playing, from Take the "A" Train to Autumn Leaves, and make our own arrangement of it, so that when others listen they can say "Oh yeah, that's So-and-so's version!" Why can't this be applied to VGM? I mean, that's a CORE part of music: being able to take someone's idea and expand upon it in your own way. It gets you thinking like they did and see how the piece itself was formed.
I would rather make an arrangement that other musicians would listen to and appreciate for years to come than make some cover of a song that the average joe would listen to for a couple of weeks and then forget about when the next musical fad came around.