>>50832166I like the difficulty settings in your image, they make a solid bandaid and the additional rules actually scale very reasonably from "basically how it already is but there's less grind and less incentive to grind" to gradual moves towards competitive rules and more punishments for failure.
The way I see RPG design, the goal is less to create a traditional idea of "difficulty", and more to allow and encourage creativity. Difficulty can and should be in service of this, mostly by way of creating obstacles that prevent you from falling into a rut.
Omori is a somewhat recent example I'd point to of a battle system that actually has a lot going for it, but is ultimately held back by the game's low difficulty preventing you from needing to branch out into the weirder ideas that are possible in the system.
Pokemon has had this problem since its inception, but I would also say its system is, in general, not great. An IDEAL answer would probably genuinely be to burn it all down and make a new monster catching RPG, but an acceptable answer is really just to make doubles the primary format of the game. Colosseum and Gale of Darkness are more functional RPGs in a sense, but I feel their mistake is in the limitations placed on team comp, ironically making their issues inverse to ordinary pokemon.
Pokemon is at its most engaging when you're trying to build a team that synergizes not just by way of having type coverage, but by having direct, planned interactions between the members of your party, that are capable of failure which needs to be accounted for. Many changes could be made in service of all this as long as you know where to look for the problems, and the problems are in format, enemy design, and AI patterns. Changes to other areas can help, but I think if these particular areas were addressed (in addition to implementing OP's difficulty options), you could actually mold nearly any mainline game into something that's actually on-par with most non-pokemon RPGs
