There are two main statements here that I think are important to reconsider, especially since you're new to the forums, so I don't know if you're new to the fandom in general.
ForsetiMaster06 said:
I don't recall a Pokemon game in recent memory that didn't have some sort of controversy surrounding it (besides maybe LA, but that's debatable).
Do you think there is any hope left that the games will have that same level of quality ever again?
Even older Pokemon games were met with some kind of controversy and/or criticism that faded with time but in time became seen as "good" due to a mix of nostalgia and not liking the current thing.
Ruby and Sapphire didn't do well at the time because, among other things, the lack of backwards compatibility. Game Freak decided to retool the way they did Pokemon in Gen III and with that they couldn't find out a way to port Pokemon from Gen II to Gen III. People hated this, it was the Dexit of its time. The eventual release of FRLG and then the portability to DPP made people forget this. Now Gen III is seen as a beloved set of games.
Black and White among other things, was considered a lot more linear, changed the EXP formula without the new Exp Share and had you go an entire main plot without access to old Pokémon. People hated this, it was the Dexit of its time. For a long time you couldn't mention Unova
(iTs IsShU aCkShUaLlY) or Black and White without someone hating on it. Now to a lot of people Black and White are seen as
the pinnacle of Pokemon.
XY, among other things, moved to 3D, and was considered too easy. People hated this, there are now people saying that the pinnacle of Pokemon was actually XY.
And so on. I'm not saying those games were awful or that they're great or anything. They have their flaws and strengths like any other game, but people in general (and Pokemon fans in particular) have a tendency to forget about their complaints in the past when comparing to something new and different.
There are always a thousand paper cuts that make people angry and when they heal, people forget they exist.
Back to the question at hand: the cynical answer is yes and no. Yes, there are people trying to innovate, and no because corporate won't give the team the resources they need to actually improve the games by much. Pokemon is, perhaps counterintuitively, a lot of the time more profitable without the polish, to the dismay of the game fans.
Modern Pokemon is uniquely held back by corporate decisions and its place as the generation starter in the Pokemon machine. If a generation could start with say, the anime or the manga or the TCG or whatever the games would get the time they need to improve and mature. Alas, it's unlikely to ever happen.
For the most part, Pokémon games within new generations have always been released approximately every three years, which is around the same time for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, meaning that they had enough time to develop the games. Simply put, the developers simply did not put enough love and care into the games because they're much lazier than they used to be.
While it is true that Scarlet and Violet had 3 years for development according to Game Freak, that's not enough time to properly develop an open world 3D game that isn't Minecraft. Breath of the Wild took 5 years to develop and it still chugs in the Nintendo Switch sometimes. Elden Ring also took 5 years to develop, Red Dead Redemption 2 took 8 years to develop.
Scarlet and Violet were easily the most ambitious Pokemon projects to date and while they are ultimately deeply flawed they were not given enough time to develop.
Not to mention that the concept of a AAA game dev, in Japan, being lazy is just not likely in and of itself. The AAA gamedev is an industry known for extreme overworking, where people are routinely exploited due to their passion, whose workers are seen as more disposable due to the constant influx of new CS graduates that want to work with games and who are routinely exposed to death threats and hate campaigns due to disgruntled players (do you remember #BringBackNationalDex death threats?).
Japan is also (in)famously known for having very strict work hours to the point where office workers often don't even go home, spending the night at the office or at a capsule hotel and they have their own word for "dying from overworking". There's a reason the Metapod sleeping bag ad that went viral years ago show an office worker and not people camping.
I find it extremely improbable that Pokemon games in particular have lazy devs when it's not a thing anywhere else in the industry, and when the current generation of devs entering the workforce grew up with Pokemon meaning they're that much easier to exploit.
My main issue with regional forms is that they don't encourage creativity and hard work from the development team. [...] Instead, I believe the developers should have just created a separate Pokémon based on a tall palm tree rather than make Exeggutor look even goofier by stretching its neck. [...] The main reason I say that they're hurting the series is because they're only causing the developers to get lazier, which, in turn, ruins the health of the game.
Modern Pokémon is a AAA franchise, the developers aren't getting anywhere near the creation of Pokémon, allocation of movesets, etc.. There are dedicated teams for that (and the results are most likely tested in some way, so not even those teams necessarily get the final say over anything) and in a few cases we even know exactly who was the designer responsible.
If anyone's getting lazier, it's the directors. From your complaints, it seems that the people you're angry at are likely either Ohmori (the game director) or Ibe (the art director), not the developers who don't get any kind of creative input.
