I'm curious to hear more on this. I've not played LGPE myself, but I was under the impression that it's been widely viewed as underwhelming, even more so than SwSh has been for some people. I've hardly ever heard anyone say that they thought LGPE was great, or even just better than SwSh.
So, okay. I've had to think about this and I guess my judgement isn't entirely fair.
Part of what I like about LGPE is that while you can dislike it, it isn't in any way
offensively bad in the way a lot of people (including me) were expecting. It's predictable, but besides that there's not really anything
wrong with it - it's a cute, competent fun coat of paint. Underwhelming sure, but I enjoyed it greatly. That might not have been enough for me to proclaim the game itself as great.
Buuuut in that regard it is still
so much better than SwSh in my opinion. While LGPE was underwhelming but didn't really have anything
wrong with it, SwSh combines both. The plot is stop-and-go with the realistic but totally uninteresting idea that the adults are taking care of everything while you go battle gyms, the pacing is TERRIBLE, the wild area is awesome but underdeveloped and needed more reasons to actually explore beyond just biking between dens, the removal of follower Pokemon
again despite all those models very undeniably being present in the game is once again one step forward and two steps back, and the characters have one personality trait (I lost count of how many times people said Leon gets lost easily. I'll take Jessie & James shoehorned into LGPE over that any day).
It might sound like I'm arguing for the safe cash grab option over the take that tried to innovate and (arguably) failed, but I don't think it's that clear-cut. LGPE didn't innovate much, but what it did, it did
very well in my opinion. The new graphic style it pioneered is gorgeous, the following Pokémon is cool and given more depth with the addition of ride mons, and the GO integration turned out to work way better than predicted.
SwSh adds a lot of new stuff, much more than LGPE but it's all so surface level. Many features feel like they didn't get nearly enough development to be intuitive. The wild area is an empty plain with a weather filter slapped on top, as opposed to the game's actual routes which have real biomes, trainers, and interesting stuff to find. The new customization is good but so awkward and full of clunky restrictions like having to talk to people to change your bike outfit, and not being able wear your new gym outfits in the gyms is just ???. Almost every city is the same boring brown brick and maybe England's just like that but it's not like they're not taking liberties elsewhere. This is the kind of stuff that should have been revised and polished during the planning and it feels like they just used their first idea of every feature and didn't discuss it further.
They're both fun games that I enjoyed but in this case I prefer the predictable but well-made game over the overambitious flop.