>>42842288GF always had the ability to work with on-gen tech. They just chose to keep rehashing the mainline series of games on handheld because that required the least effort, resulted in the biggest profit, and the company had the workflow for it figured out. You even admit that "Game Freak stuck to what they knew worked," and this is because they are lazy and would find themselves incompetent when trying something new at the fear of losing money. From a company's financial standpoint sure, more profit for less cost is better, which is what GF is good at pulling, but that doesn't change the fact that the resulting game is shit. Now that they tried to actually do full 3D with the open area concept, anyone with at least 2 brain cells notices how pathetic and half-assed of an attempt it is, especially for the current time.
The comparison is perfectly valid. It's absolutely inexcusable that a game that attempts an open world environment 16 years ago did it better than a game that attempts it now. I'd love (and always hopeful) to see a major improvement in the next mainline game GF puts out, but that's highly unlikely at this point. Even in the past, they never really had major graphical improvements while working on the same console (I'd say the Gen 4 -> Gen 5 difference was the most substantial), so your idea of them to "take advantage of next time" is yet another attempt at explaining why it's okay for GF to be incompetent, rather than why they aren't.
