This is kind of a touchy subject, but I agree, gameplay should be prioritized over story. In the words of Jeremy from Pure Pwnage, "If I wanted a compelling story, I'd read a book. There's only a few million of them already in existence..." and this was something said before 2010, of all things. The prevalence of story telling through games, is, for the most part, hit or miss depending on how the developer does it. To compare it to good story telling, Valve and the Half-Life series hit the target every time. If you've played it, you'll know what I'm talking about, but essentially, there is a lot of world building; Yet you're never taken out of the story abruptly. In fact, there are no straight up cutscenes, and especially in Half-Life 1, you are never constrained when important things are happening around you that advance the plot. What I've seen, in most complaints about the game, is that it is very much a feeling of hand holding about every 14-15 minutes of story progression, which definitely is a way- but for something like Pokemon, where the age old premise of it is to explore, find rare Pokemon, complete a dex and catch them all, there's an awful lot of story involved with that, for some reason. USUM definitely still try to give you smaller "events" as they're called to make the world believable, and I am having an alright time going along with all of it there, but route design, especially in the past two games, has just been poor. The most exploration in the game probably happens on the first island, with Seaward Cave and what that leads to, but that's about it. However, what USUM also does pretty well is that it introduces other concepts that previously were not obvious for new/casual players, namely status changing moves. I am seeing an abundance of status changing moves in the game that the AI will try to use, which is a plus. But why not go all the way and have more common/standard double battles?
1/?
