Has anyone here ever felt that in the first, second, and third season of pokemon there was a solid story line and direction that the anime was going in?
The anime has undergone a routine of 'resetting' Ash every time he goes to a new region since the beginning of Hoenn, which entails him leaving all his Pokémon except for Pikachu behind, getting a new outfit, and his traveling companions getting replaced. The Unova saga magnified this to a considerable extent.
I remember, when he revisited Viridian City to challenge the Gym for his final Kanto badge, at that point he said "it's been a whole year since I've been here", or something similar to that. Then it took until either late in Orange Islands or early in Johto before his Charizard would obey him (I seem to remember the main reason he lost to Ritchie in the Indigo League championships being that Charizard wouldn't obey.) Indeed, he even kept his original Kanto/Indigo outfit all the way through Johto!
But, with each new generation released comes a near-complete reset for Ash among the lines I stated above. Hence why there's "Original Series", "Advance Generation", "Diamond and Pearl", and "Best Wishes".
The main reason for this is so they can keep the show targeted towards young children and pre-teens-if they made it so Ash actually aged throughout the show's run, ratings would fall so low, that the show would probably have been canceled a long time ago. (Forget about what Kids' WB said about "soft ratings" being the reason they dropped Pokémon when the WB and UPN merged into CW-the real reason was because of federal restrictions on product placement in children's programming due to the war on obesity.) Pokémon is not a soap opera, despite what Pojo's magazine used to say about it.