Sun/Moon's biggest mistake right here.

I can't for the life of me understand how we went from the PSS in XY and ORAS to this clusterfuck of a system, Everything is so clunky and poorly designed that it just kills my willingness to trade and battle other people.

I'm not sure why they thought it'd be a good idea to have the player be completely cut off from the online infrastructure while playing the campaign and concentrating it inside of this place. If you're not chatting with your friends elsewhere and want to trade with them you can't even be playing at the same time, it requires you to GO to the Plaza in order to find them in the middle of incredibly bland and poorly designed menus. Sure, you can set them as VIPs once you do find them, but how did we go from the Friend/Passerby system, that looked really neat and tidy, to a boring list? Jesus.

I'm not sure if this is GF's plan and solution for the Switch not having dual screens, but it's a poor one and really killed a lot of the charm that the online in XY/ORAS had.