>>47278992I think they don't use old trainer sprites because they wanna make the regions be unique, with its own fashion style.
Originally I bet the reason was because people will get bored of looking at the same reused sprite from gen 1, and they didn't wanna lose their audience.
As to why they didn't bring Hex Maniac back, if they start bringing trainer npcs back, people will start to complain why their fav trainer npc wasn't brought back in the next game, and that it's unfair that someone else's fav got brought back instead. They don't wanna start that discourse and worsen the brand.
