You know, Pokemon dungeons really aren't that good. Sure they're better than a straight line, or nothing in the case of Vela, but they're nothing great by RPG standards. Almost none of the puzzles are particularly interesting. The level design is rarely complex enough that just figuring out where to go is particularly interesting. And random encounters are more of a tedious pain in the ass than pretty much any other JRPG, you get very little from fighting them, and you can easily ignore them with Repels. Actually if they could somehow fix just the random encounters then even the Gen I and II era dungeon design would probably be good enough, but...
