How many Pokemon can you get before it becomes too much to handle?
After playing Red, I actually adapted pretty easily to Gold. There were plenty of old favorites, and enough new Pokemon to keep it interesting. Lots were obtainable, and I could trade easily from Red to Gold so I could get my old team.
Hoenn threw me for a loop, though. While the graphics were obviously wayyy superior, thanks to the Gameboy Advanced, I felt disoriented. The Hoenn Dex has far fewer Pokemon from the first two generations than Johto does of the first.
With the advent of FireRed, I had mostly wrapped my mind around the thought of 386. It was a lot, sure, but there were enough new ones that I took a liking to (Milotic, Jirachi, Mawile, and Gardevoir, to name a few) that I accepted the third generation. Later, I found that this was my favorite generation simply because of the hackability potential (Shiny Gold was and remains my favorite Pokemon game, unofficial or otherwise).
Now, there are almost 500 Pokemon, and that number is going to grow, likely by another 100 or so, in the fifth generation. How long is it before the only Pokemon we see from the first generation are Charizard, Mewtwo, Gyarados, and Dragonite? How many more Pokemon will it take before they simply run out of ideas (or their ideas become so repetitive or alien that it's functionally the same thing)? I worry that as soon as the next generation, and certainly by Generation VII or VIII, Pokemon will succumb to these pitfalls.
A question, though: what if the next generation were to introduce far fewer Pokemon, and focus on being able to obtain many more than just the regional Pokedex affords? Part of my irritation with the Gen III and IV remakes is that new Pokemon are not very well integrated. (In Shiny Gold, for example, Hoenn Pokemon are found everywhere, they're just hard to find. The Hoenn Sound and Sinnoh Sound are kinda like that, but you can't do that until you get the National Pokedex. That defeats the purpose of it, at least for me.
Another thing I'm interested in seeing is whether they'll make a Hoenn remake in Generation V. Would you buy it if it came out?