>>54762726Gates has a lot of good characters, but the game is soured by a limited enemy lineup, many of which have supremely irritating moves (pluck and bug bite eat your seeds, incinerate burns them away). The text speed is also miserably slow and the dungeons have awful layouts.
Super's layouts aren't as frustrating, but it has breaks which basically makes using anything that's not the protag/partner an exercise in frustration. Also has a slow opening that turns off a lot of people.
RTDX is way different than the original, but it's in mostly good ways in my eyes. No running around friend areas, but now there's more emphasis on having a team of pokemon. It's hard to go into depth in just one post, but there's a demo out there if you're curious.
As for romhacks, you could try out Project Orion if you want a "Vanilla+" hack of Sky. It's got things like Trap Avoider as a default IQ skill, a mostly new starter lineup, total pelipper death, and an Aegis Cave that does away with the Unown Stones. The changelog's massive and the hack is in one of the OP links
