Why would a Simpsons movie be made long after the tv show started sucking?”
Well, first off, I don’t know if the series is sucking, like you say. But, it is running quite long already. So, after so long, even the writers and cartooneers working on the Simpsons might get a bit bored. So, what better to spice things up than make a long movie? You get to have more budget, a far longer episode, and a whole different audience to attend to (including the people that had left the series a few years ago). So, it is quite common to do a movie of something that actually is a bit beyond its freshness-date, simply because they can, and ppl will go and watch it out of renewed interest.