Masuda stated during an interview during the XY period that from that point on, they would develop mainline Pokemon games with the Japanese mobile market in mind. This basically means that, because of Masuda, every mainline Pokemon game is going to be easy as fuck because he wants them to appeal to mobile gamers. It's safe to say that the increased casualization and hand-holding is literally all this man's fault.

Now, GF is a terribly fucking incompetent developer; their programmers are dogshit and they underdevelop their games on hardware that is clearly capable of doing more than what they shit out. But let's say Masuda retires and someone new takes the helm. Sure, we'd still have poorly coded and optimize games, but how much would the franchise improve if Masuda fucked off and let someone with actual game developing experience take over? Could it be any worse than gen 6? Could anything be?