Continuing on a conversation initially sparked in the "Pokémon that disappointed you..." thread because it seems more appropriate here:
I think Pokémon is way past due for a technical content overhaul of sorts. The amount of aggregated content from eight generations of a "put more on the pile" philosophy is starting to reach a point beyond the manageable (which in itself is a problem), while some of it really needs management. We're not just talking about some old Pokémon being hopelessly unviable in current gens either, but mechanical issues that are really holding the games back. Gen VIII took some baby steps towards culling some unneeded moves and re-balancing others, but there's so much of Pokémon's old content that could use more attention to be less of a hassle to players in the future. To elaborate:
- I think we all have rolled our eyes at ridiculous evolution requirements over the years. Most notorious is perhaps the evolution levels of some Unova Pokémon. The prevailing philosophy seems to have been "well, players can only encounter it at level 45 and up, and we want them to use the base stage for a few levels before it evolves, so an evolution level of 52 seems reasonable" while the Pokémon has the same stats as ones that evolves at level 27 (literal example, by the way: compare Pawniard and Stufful). This is a good way to make the Pokémon the millstone of any player's team should it ever be found at earlier points in future games - USUM Noibat comes to mind, with the same BST as Starly yet it doesn't evolve until 10 levels after Starly has evolved twice. Dreepy promises to be a proper pain in the buttocks, learning almost no moves at all before it evolves at level 50. This will effectively make it completely useless in any appearance earlier than level 45 or so. Other examples include "worst use of a Moon Stone ever" Skitty, "I hope all future consoles include a gyroscope" Inkay, "literal coin toss" Wurmple, or ...
- ... the seemingly endless parade of items that have no purpose other than evolving or changing the form of one single Pokémon. Roughly a third of those evolution items were included in Gen VIII alone. We're not talking about evolution stones either, which at least serve the purpose of evolving multiple Pokémon. Stuff like the Dragon Scale, Reaper Cloth, Up-Grade, Whipped Dream, or the seven different Milcery Sweets. Sure, the first time you find those they can be considered cool accessories to a Pokémon that holds center stage that generation, but in subsequent generations they are nothing but a hassle for both the player and the programmers. As if they will ever again make a set of four meadows with different types of Nectar just for the sake of Oricorio. Legendaries have it even worse. One generation sends you on a grand quest to retreive the DNA Splicers from a mad villain, or find the Red Orb on top of a remote mountain, and in the next generation a nameless NPC will just hand you the stuff. Immersion!
- Shiny forms even experts can barely tell from the original, yet whose Pokémon's shiny form is seen as a Big Deal. Take Zapdos, for instance. You have to be really dang good to tell the normal and shiny versions apart, yet Shiny Zapdos is an incredibly rare legendary and sure to be the trophy of any shiny collection. It kind of baffles me that Niantic did nothing to fix this in Pokémon Go, but I suppose TPC didn't let them because of copyright. It then baffled me that TPC didn't let them sort that out anyway, given the relative ease of finding a new colour scheme and how much of a selling point it would be in Pokémon Go. Heck, wouldn't the transition to 3D models in Gen VI have been a perfect occasion to sort out the least noticeable shiny colours? At least for fan favourite designs such as Garchomp or Gengar?
- A whole lot of Pokémon stuck in stiff and strange Sky Battle poses. Pokémon like Skarmory, Salamence, or Xatu have always held distinct poses standing on the ground, while now they are just hovering. All for the sake of being able to appear in a gimmicky battle style that was phased out after one single pair of games. Meanwhile, standing poses for the Pokémon do exist, but they appear only in the generational equivalent of Pokémon Amie.
- Abilities in general: a Pokémon can only have two possible abilities + one Hidden Ability, and most Pokémon have had all three slots filled since Gen V or so. Yet more abilities keep being introduced, but very few of them can be assigned to old Pokémon because all their slots are long since filled. Contrast this with moves, where most Pokémon lack any restrictions on the size of their movepools, so new moves keep being added to the movepools of old Pokémon all the time. With moves, you can pick four out of dozens, but with abilities you can pick one out of only three. I guess regional forms partially address this, however.
- Shenanigans with the Pokédex, such as cross-generation evolution families not being consistently placed next to each other, Nidoran's two genders still taking up two dex slots, alternate forms such as regional forms not getting separate Pokédex slots, stuff like that.
- Old mechanics issues that somehow haven't been fixed. As it stands, Nidorina and Nidoqueen can't breed, for reasons I can't fathom. Deerling and Sawsbuck's form changes were tied to the abandoned Seasons mechanic, meaning that Deerling in games post Gen V are stuck in their form, and Deerling has only been re-introduced in Spring form since then. This means only Deerling transfered from Gen V can take other forms than Spring Form. Hidden Power could never take on the Fairy-type, although it has been removed altogether so I guess that point is moot. Fairy never got a type-boosting item other than the Pixie Plate, though. These are just quick examples off the top of my head, I think there are many more quirky cases out there. At least they fixed the Azurill gender issue.
- IVs. Enough said.
- Battles being clunky as heck, with that whole "First, A happens. Only after A finishes, B can happen. Then it's C's turn afterwards" thing. I'm not talking about the concept of turn-based battles, or how it's determined when each Pokémon gets to move, but the user interface experience: i.e. the popup for an ability first occurs in text, then the effect of the ability is applied (in case of Intimidate, for instance, attack is lowered on each opposite Pokémon in turn, each accompanied by a "Pokémon's Attack fell!" message), then Pokémon will attack, then the HP bar of the target Pokémon will be lowered, then the Pokémon faints, then there's a message saying the Pokémon fainted, then the XP bar goes up, etc. So much of this crud could have happened simultaneously, so many of the popups could have been optional, the battles could have happened so much faster and smoother. I got Camara on the OI Discord to time it for me: starting an encounter with a wild Pokémon, OHKO-ing it, ending the battle and being able to take another step takes a minimum of 16 seconds in Pokémon Shield. SadisticMystic reports times upwards of 20-25 seconds in the 3DS games - with move animations off. Around half a second of this is spent on actual gameplay (selecting a move, mashing A to move text along) and the rest is waiting for the game to chug along. Even turning off move animations doesn't do much, given how it's all the other stuff that takes time. This is needlessly clunky, but it's probably a consequence of ...
- ... the code of the games still being partially based on a code framework written for Ruby and Sapphire. Much like Game Freak's design philosophy, it seems like their whole development strategy is based on the concept of piling new stuff on top of old, without taking time to overhaul anything. Never mind all the old dummied-out Key Items that still float around the code, probably because removing any of them could have unforeseen consequences. Take out the Red Chain, some pointers go haywire, and suddenly you need to trade Dusclops holding a Super Repel in order to evolve it, stuff like that.
In short, the Pokémon games retain a lot of content and mechanics that no longer work as originally intended, that have been left obsolete by new conventions, or that were never meant to be useful beyond that one time it looked really cool and now just hangs around being a hassle. I'm honestly not sure for how much longer they can keep it up like this. Rumours suggest Sword and Shield's development was severely hampered by the challenge of just getting all the old stuff to work. Dexit was apparently caused by the realization that this can't go on forever - yet it was followed up with the devs not changing course one bit, continuing to do the stuff that led to the problems Dexit tried to address in the first place.
And then there's the difficult part: The fact that more new content is being piled on top of old is one of the main draws of the Pokémon games, and why fans stick to it for several generations. As demonstrated by Dexit, fans will be furious if any content is cut. However, other fans will be jaded and quit if nothing changes either, and new players may find it difficult to get a grip on the vast extent of the content of these games. Nostalgia sells, but it doesn't sell by itself. New content has to be added, old content has to be acknowledged, the sum of the content is nearly overwhelming as it is ... there really is no way to please everyone here. Any approach - including doing nothing at all - will be met with vocal opposition from some substantial portion of their fan base. Something has to give, and now I'm curious to see what.
Game Freak is going at it like a restaurant that keeps adding dishes to its menu, despite their cooks being overworked, the guests not knowing what half the stuff on offer is or able to tell the dishes apart, storage space for ingredients being a concern, and half the dishes never being ordered by anybody but a few loud guests that will make a heck of a fuss were they ever taken off the menu. At some point they won't be able to keep all of it up any longer, and I wonder which bit they will compromise on first.