I was playing through a hack recreating the space world demo full game and the changes from the beta to the actual game really are immense.
>Giovanni is back as leader of team Rocket and the last E4 member
>imposter Oak from the TCG is one of the Rocket admins
>E4 is Lorelei, Koga, Agatha, Giovanni and Lance (where's Bruno?)
>gym leaders are the same but Chuck is replaced by a Japanese delinquent dark type gym leader and Claire is replaced by Red
>professor Elm doesn't exist and Oak is the professor, with Blue as his assistant
>Kanto reduced to a big city (very confusing to navigate and Pallet Town is also empty, only Red's mother lives in it, I thought that was sad)
>Team rocket plot is very similar but instead of Lance assisting you, the dark type gym leader helps out instead
>Silver is a friendly rival all throughout the game but at the end still gives the same speech about needing to respect his Pokémon more and treat them with kindness, I thought that was weird

BTW game I played was Gold 97
What does /vp/ think? Do you prefer any of the original elements?
I think it's surprising Gen 2 was changed so much and that the original beta was sticking even more to the formula of the first game than gen 2 did. I think Gen 2 feels appropriately as an expansion to Gen 1, whereas this beta mostly seemed like Gen 1 reimagined.
The cut Pokémon were cool though, like Raitora and Wolfman. Also would have liked imposter Oak to be canon and the dark type gym leader was also pretty cool.