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The reason why Pokemon is struggling to put out good games is because gamefreak is struggling to please two very different groups. You have the hardcore players, people who have been playing every single gen on release and you have less dedicated fans, many of whom haven't played a Pokemon game since gen 1 or 2. And even beyond that you have people who have never played a Pokemon game, either because they were too young or just never developed an interest in it.
The first group is looking for a traditional JRPG. Turn based combat. Min maxing. Number crunching. Little story. Linear design. Call it an old style of game design.
On the other hand you have the other two groups who don't have that attachment to the old games. They have no interest whatsoever in traditional JRPGs and want Pokemon to move away from that gameplay and design as much as possible. They want story and characters. They want "cool" battle mechanics like Z moves or dynamaxing. They don't want to him max and they despise grinding. They want Pokemon to become an open world game, and eventually move away from turn based combat.
What gamefreak is trying to do is to move as quickly as possible in changing the games to appeal to the latter, without doing so too quickly and pissing off the former. That's why it's become a sort of awkward middle ground between old style JRPGs and a modern adventure game. The old style turn based JRPG genre is dead but they're trying to be sneaky about killing it off.
