Routes! HUH! Yeah! What are they good for?

Routes are usually those paths that connect us from significant areas such as towns to cities ... well, besides the obvious reason of training up through wild battles and trainer battles, what are they good for, in your opinion?
Do you like seeing events in routes or do you like the break away from the story to focus on your Pokemon?
Do routes NEED to have events to appeal you or are you okay with just a quick walk to the next part of the story?
Do you look for unique things in your routes like perhaps some sort of feature i.e. the forest is filled with cocoons everywhere hanging from trees, or maybe it has a lot of ponds, maybe the trees are rogybiv colors, stones everywhere like Giant's Causeway in Ireland, perhaps the trees are on fire, there are windmills everywhere... or do you just like the straight to the facts, ma'am style?

Not only the style, but how do you feel about the environments people choose? Most games like to do deserts and a lot of custom games like to try to incorporate snow places to the north or south ... do you think a game should capture all environments in a region, or stick to one or two since regions, if based on fast the player walks, is really small?

Not every route needs an event It will be good if the hack has an important event in a route to make the game for fun and interesting. Maybe they have to find something in that route or catch something (get what I'm trying to say). So yeah that's my small little opinion on routes.

I like a route to have good geographical variety and attractiveness. Aesthetic appeal. I like it to make a sort of logic for the area it's in, like Mt. Moon should be mountainous and slightly forested like a real mountain, a forest should have odd ponds or streams here and there. I don't really care if there are a ton of events, but I expect a good amount of trainer battles and wild pokemon variety. I don't think a game needs to cram every single type of landscape possible unless it's cramming in 649+ pokemon, in which case it needs to be pretty big-I'm talking minimum two regions. Otherwise, just be sensible, geography isn't hard.

For my routes, I'll throw in events if it makes sense in the story, or I feel like a small event with a side character will prop up the plot pacing a bit.

I do try to give each of my routes a unique feature or a geographical focal point to switch it up for the player. My route one starts off on an upper ridge, for example, and all of the grass is on the lower level. You navigate up to the lab's town through bridges that you'll be able to pass under (to get to the tall grass) when you get your first Pokemon. My second route has a river running through it in the center, with an interesting fishing bridge connecting the two halves, a house on a cliff near the waterfall that forms the river. Something to mix things up so that the route isn't so... "monochrome" in form, if you know what I mean. All of my other routes have themes that go with them as well. One's a quiet, almost suburban path that's packed with Trainers that you have to go off the main road a bit to find tall grass in. The next houses ample farmland with a bunch of little things the player can do for the farmers for rewards. I've got a long desert route planned with a solar power plant on it that supplies power for the big city. I find it's much easier to actually design an enjoyable route to play through with some sort of general theme or plan in mind.

As for the number of environments, I won't be doing any snowy routes. As for why? One, I hate winter and if a game starts out in or has an early snow level I'm not going to like it and likely to never play it again (I couldn't play Skyrim because of this. Quit about 15 minutes in. Dragon Age: Inquisition is another example. I LOVE the DA series, but I haven't picked up my 20 minutes in save since I bought the game). I hate the bleak and two-toned snow areas in real life and in videogames. Two, my region is somewhere between subtropical and tropical depending on where you are, so it wouldn't make sense to have a snow route. I think that if a hacker wants to include a myriad of climates or location types in their hack, go for it! But try to make it make sense in regards to placement in the region and its relation to other areas. A desert route next to a tundra route is not a good idea, unless you somehow move the player a great distance between the routes with ingame transit or something.