Quoted By:
Game Freak boiled us like frogs.
If these games had been released immediately after BW2, the entire fanbase would have absolutely flipped shit and they would have done terribly. The downgrade would have been massively obvious even to most drones and it would have damaged sales significantly.
Instead, Game Freak were insidious, downgrading the games slowly but surely over the last half a decade, minimising the backlash, so when they finally dropped Let's Go on us the backlash was muted (they also helped themselves by pandering to the kinds of people who would probably literally eat Masuda's shit if it had a Pokémon logo on it, further drowning out the voices of displeased fans). The downgrade is nowhere near as obvious now because we've been slowly but surely moving towards it for years.
In other words, we should have reacted more harshly while we still had the chance. Our begrudging acceptance of previous games is what led us here.
