- The Emerald battle engine upgrade is currently far inferior to the CFRU's. First off the CFRU's is actually complete, unlike Emerald's which is still missing several features. Second, the AI in the EBEU isn't nearly as good as the CFRU's. And third, most of the attack animations in the EBEU came from an older version of the CFRU. I've since updated many of those animations -- updates which are not reflected in the EBEU. So until the EBEU surpasses the CFRU's battle engine, I wouldn't willingly switch. And you could argue "But, Skeli, unless you quit binary hacking and improving the CFRU how are they supposed to pass it?". I'm one programmer who's barely done anything to it in the last year while they're a team of several. I think they have all the advantage they need.
With all due respect, I don't think it's fair to compare the CFRU and the Expansion. They clearly have different goals and different definitions of completion.
Last time I checked, the CFRU was missing moves such as Ally Switch, many abilities, certain mechanics such as the damage reduction of Super Effective moves against Flying-type Pokémon while Delta Stream's weather condition is in effect, and battle types like the SOS Battles introduced in the Gen. 7 Pokémon Games.
These are all things that the expansion either has, or has already started to look into.
That's not to mention that the CFRU has issues of its own which you didn't talk about at all.
If you want to talk about the cons of the expansion, it is only fair to talk about the CFRU's own too.
For example, the CFRU has an extended saving time which is not present in the expansion.
Its latest versions have a problem with the DNS system which you know that I mentioned on the CFRU's repository through an existing Issue ticket dedicated to it, and that at the time of this post is still present.
Hell, as I double checked right now, I'm noticing a new issue; the information bar in the start menu isn't being hidden when you change the Button Mode to LR like it is in vanilla, which as a Player is one of the very first things I always do.
Granted, that could have been a change made on purpose. That I don't know.
You may consider it complete, but personally, I wouldn't. Not when it has issues that can be spotted without much effort.
EDIT: And keep in mind these are just the ones I'm personally aware of, and I'm no longer an avid binary hacker. I barely used the CFRU myself.
But hey, I might as well add something that I'm just remembering.
At some point, while helping people in the past at the community's Discord server, I came across at least 1 or 2
configs of the CFRU that when disabled, impeded you from injecting it into a ROM at all.
You won't see that in the expansion, and if you
(figuratively speaking) do, make sure to report it either on RHH's Discord server or the Pokeemerald-expansion's GitHub repository, and it'll be fixed asap
The point about move animations is whatever. That's a completely subjective topic.
The expansion doesn't
need to use the new animations, though I will conceed that many of them could use a revamp, such as Draco Ascent's.
I can completely agree with the rest though. The AI is a bit messy and likely inferior, and the project is still missing features that the CFRU has within its scope, such as Dynamax Battles.
These are both being worked on, mind you. The AI is modified at a constant rate adding new logic and fixing whatever issues as they pop up, and the Dynamax Battles are being slowly worked on inside of a Draft Pull Request in the expansion's repository.