>>47721783Because they want "each gen to feel special" so they cut Amie and Refresh.
The sad thing is you can clearly see there WERE plans to make Amie (or something similar) the mechanic still. All Gen 8 Pokemon have a feeding animation where they hold their hands out for a food item that isn't there and it's also how they eat the imaginary food. Furthermore there's a lot of unused animations in the files for the personality/flavor animations other Pokemon had in Refresh/Amie, and while some are in the game the conditions for them to trigger and actually SEE them only apply to a singular one (the angry animation, which plays when a Pokemon loses a race or gets it's ball stolen by a different Pokemon). Those angry animations actually provide personality to them as well. For example, Rillaboom's has him ACTUALLY BEAT HIS CHEST LIKE A FUCKING GORILLA instead of using his drum. Yes, he actually does it. But the animation is so fucking niche that most people literally don't realize it exists.
The reigning theory that SWSH was originally meant to be for the 3DS and got hastily rushed and sloppily reworked into a Switch Title I think holds some water when you consider how fucked up Camp is and all the wasted or out-of-place animations (not to mention a lot of other things). It's a victim of the crunch time, unfortunately. And going by how drones responded to it I don't think TPCI will let them off the leash any time soon.