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>Friend areas were always glorified menus
Yes they are.
But they added to the game. It gave a realistic hub to where your friend pokemon would live while play the game and you can walk around and interact. The friend system change to selecting a team from pages is a lot faster than loading and navigating friend areas, but it comes at the cost of losing RPG mechanics that worked in the game where you could interact with you squad members. Imagine if the friend areas acted like camp sites? That would be amazing.
Reducing friend areas to menus is akin to reducing the warp maps from Crash Bandicoot to menus.