After reading this and other opinions like it, i thought I should say...
Well...no matter how much realism or maturity you add, no matter how great your story is(unlike ruby destiny which had a terrible story and was a terrible hack), no matter how much minor swearing you add, it's not going to make pokemon more fun. That's the whole point of hacking, to make pokemon more fun.
Let's take a closer look...what's the problem with pokemon in general? It lacks fun, it lacks good gameplay. The two most broad components that go into a game are gameplay and storyline. To fix pokemon, you must make the gameplay better. Sure a good storyline adds to a game(as long as it's good) but rewriting the storyline of a game with bad gameplay doesn't help anything. To prove this, look at storyline and gameplay. Can a game exist with gameplay only? Yes, example is tetris. Can a game exist with a storyline only? No, if you have storyline and no gameplay that would be a movie.
Well then...how do you fix gameplay? It's basically impossible to fix everything in a rom hack do to it's limiting nature, but you can improve some things at the very least. For example, fix imbalances in pokemon stats?
In conclusion: To fix pokemon, you need to make it fun. To make it fun, you need to fix gameplay. Like I said the most that could honestly be done in a hack is improve a few of the flaws of Pokemon... And it's not about the fame when you do a rom hack, it's about fixing the game. Hopefully it all makes sense... [Players] want a hack to make pokemon more fun, and improve it's flaws.
Although I agree with some of your points I must disagree nonetheless. You say that a game is all about gameplay, and that a game can exist without a story. Bith true, however, this is Pokemon we are talking about. And what is Pokemon? An RPG. And half of an RPG is the story.
Now sure if you have a good story but bad gameplay it isn't a good game. But what if we did it your way and had no story but good gameplay? It would be a game comprised of a neverending series of battles. Sure you can fix stat inbalences and make the metagame absoultly perfect, but what then? The game would get real boring, real fast.
The fact of the matter is that this is a ROM hack and that you don't have absoute freedom. So in order to make a good, original game you can't focus on improving one feature, instead you must make improvements to all features, and add all you can with the limited creative leeway you have. In the end, in a Pokemon game, what is a good story without good gameplay, in the same respect, what is good gameplay without a story to carry it.
You may want to argue that a story is completly unescessary when gameplay is good, which, to an extent, is true. But such things only apply in certiain scenerios. Let's look at you example, Tetris. Tetris is a puzzle game, and puzzles don't have stories. Another example, Pac-Man only exists to get high scores, thus, a story is unneded. However in Pokemon, a story
is needed to keep the gameplay fresh, otherwise it is pointless leveling up.
TL;DR: Improving gameplay is important, but in an RPG such as Pokemon, a story is needed to drive the gameplay foward.
PS: Fixing stat imbalances really wont improve the game an awful amount. It would be really hard to notice that Farfecht'd can take a few more hits than normal. If you ask me, making the gameplay more fun is a matter of making it playable and challenging. I want to be able to have fun leveling Pokemon up, meaning that it isn't slow-paced, but also not too fast. Also, I want a challenge. But people take that the wrong way. They think challenge = give trainers Pokemon that are ten levels higher than your own, it doesn't. Part of it is having trainers have higher leveled Pokemon than yourself, but only slightly so. Mostly it means giving them good Pokemon with diverse types and challeging movesets.