>>20383430DP is the only season that had planned recurring storylines like J and Paul rivalry, which by this number of episodes had already been introduced, and Dawn had done way more than Serena has. Clemont has done more than Brock has probably, but Brock's character development was a bit more "subtle" in retrospect. You could tell they already were thinking of the whole Pokemon doctor thing pretty early on in that series. Comparing animation obviously XY is going to be better, it's coming out like 6 years later.
In comparison, Malamar has appeared in XY and that's the only sign of any plot so far (outside of Lysandre smirking), which might be comparable to J but I get the feeling he's just part of the Flare plot, so it won't have the "free range" an original villain like J did. There's nothing like Paul unless they try to work Alain into the story that way somehow, but they'll need to really work to get that same emotional investment you could have with Ash vs Paul.
As far as shit filler goes, DP actually started off by trying a lot of new things with their filler (like Team Rocket borrowing Aipom). Not like XY hasn't already had its share of bad filler, although I'm sure you'll get a range of answers as to which ones are bad.
Shit pacing is something nobody could really do anything about. They wanted to have a long league arc instead of having filler at the end so they could make people think that that was it, it was the final league, but DPP gen dragged on way longer than they thought it would, apparently.
I hope this season turns out to be great, but there were things DP had set up by now that this series doesn't look like it will have.
