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I'm beginning to think that the current state of Pokemon has as much to do with a long string of overcorrecting for relatively minor mistakes as it does with institutional rot or incompetence at Nintendo/TPC/Game Freak. People complained that Hoenn was too wet, so big water routes stopped being made. Then they tried a revisitable megadungeon, which got them in trouble for being too hard for small children. People also disliked the designs of the crossgen evos in DPP, and as a result gen 5 was a circular hallway with a few small dungeons an entirely new pokedex, but then people hated the hallway and wanted their favorites back. At this point, in gen 6, you can see the fatigue start to set in. What are they supposed to do? Every time Pokemon does something new people hate it because it's different, and every time they try to address issues in previous games people hate it because it's not different enough. All that's left is nostalgia for the old games, but people hate that too. There's nothing left to try, so why bother trying at all?
Mind you, I'm not apologizing for anyone or saying that these criticisms are without merit. A lot of these things were poorly received because they were poorly implemented. Hoenn being so wet wouldn't be as much of an issue if you weren't constantly getting assaulted by Pelipper and Tentacool and if they had done more with diving. Mt. Coronet would have been a lot more fun to explore if they had put more effort into making its different areas look less similar and hadn't loaded it with the most annoying pokemon imaginable. Even Unova's hallway would have been a lot better if you had been able to explore it counterclockwise if you so desired. But Nintendo as a whole has always had an issue with being once bitten twice shy and placing the blame on concept rather than execution, but Pokemon seems to have it worse. Game Freak is simultaneously too sensitive to criticism while also not understanding it.
