Everything XY did right, SM did wrong, and vice versa.

Every quality of life improvement SM made as far as poke ride replacing HMs, easily picking pokeballs, adding a pokemon to the party after its caught, etc. is nullified when you look at how clunky the online is and how smooth the PSS was in XY. XY had a region that was kind of clunky and disjointed, but I prefer that over the boring sameness of Alola which just feels like your going on a shitty tour bus of the same looking routes the whole time. The chibi-ness look in XY wasn't the best, but the scale of the land made exploration fun, whereas the models are better in SM but it makes the world feel very small, barren, and closed off. And having the models rendered in battle was a terrible choice that ruins the scale of the pokemon and drops the framerate. The story is SM is more interesting than XY (though it's butchered in USUM) but that's at the cost of far more frequent interruptions. And the Kalos dex still can't be beat, even when you consider USUM, especially since so many Alola pokemon are terrible.

I could go on and on, but the point I'm trying to make is, why didn't gen 7 IMPROVE on gen 6? Why are we just trading problems? I STILL prefer replaying XY because at least it has less cutscenes and more pokemon to choose from. I thought Z would've been spectacular, but no.