>>37182667Several reasons why.
1) Slice-of-life/lack of significant story. Face it, the majority of this series is episodic filler. There is very little bearing on the actual story or character development, just the main characters doing unconventional things such as playing baseball or hosting school plays.
2) There is a much larger cast in this series than in past ones. We have 6 trainers; we've never had more than 3 in any given series. (AG and XY had 4 protagonists, but only 3 of them were trainers.) Even then, the side trainers rarely caught more than 3 Pokemon and were just in the way. We have SIX of these trainers now. Six. And all of Ash's companions here have either 1 or 2 Pokemon, not including the Ride Pokemon such as Lana's Lapras or Kiawe's Charizard. Many of the captures that would have went to Ash went to these characters instead. And Gen VII was already very limited in the number of Pokemon it could give to Ash.
3) Most plot-related episodes do not result in captures or evolutions. Most of the plot stuff just focused on the "lore" of Alola or concepts introduced in the games, such as the various Poke Rides or the legends of the island guardians. Trials, Grand Trials, Aether. We also had nearly a dozen Ultra Guardian mission episodes where the main characters just hunt down and catch a specific Pokemon to prevent it from causing havoc. Finally, the fact that SM had such a MASSIVE cast (almost every type is associated with a character here, and we're still not done) means that we had plenty of guest characters from the games show up as well, including the Kahunas, Ilima, Acerola, and Mina that all took at least an episode for themselves .
