How can pokemon be improved?

In my opinion, there should be a way to raise your pokemon without grinding. Even trainer battles could fall into this category. Endless "wild" trainer battles are getting stale. Perhaps throwing in some sort of tasks or quests system. Say you have to rescue some trainer or his pokemon (or both), that got lost in the woods/mountains/mountainous woods. You would have to fight wild pokemon as usual, but you would be going somewhere, towards some goal, and you would gain additional experience and items upon completing the quest.

Next, revamping the gyms system. Again, this is something that I'd like to see, but I'm not fully sure how it should be done. You could have optional gym trainers battles. Then the only required battle could be the battle with the gym leader. And like BadPokemon said, perhaps adding more gyms and making the elite four super tough.

Another one I like is the idea of "evil" champions. Say, like in the pokemon manga. The Elite Four were bad and the Hero had to defeat them.

+ Post-Main-Quest quests .. I remember beating Fire Red and doing the Sevii Islands Quest. It was the best post-game thing ever. And when I was finished with that, I searched the land far and wide in order to find more stuff, but there was nothing to do anymore. There's something fun in doing post-game stuff, when your pokemon are already leveled and when you're done with saving the world or whatever.

I'd like a little more depth to the story than the usual villainous team and their antics. It's still interesting but they could do so, so much more with it. X and Y have made the game franchise better by introducing new ways to build affection and EV train so I have hopes we're moving forward. :)

well, all the games begin with the protagonist moving from another region. I'd like to be able to have the opportunity to go back to the region whence he/she came