Gen 1 is a broken mess. There is something fun about the crazy wild west shit, but it's absolutely not balanced.
Gen 2 is way too centralized around Snorlax. Everything is either Snorlax, a Snorlax counter, or a Snorlax counter-counter.
Gen 3 is alright, if a bit too stally. And mons suffer from a lack of options pretty often because they have pretty bad movepools and there aren't many good items.
Gen 4 is the peak. Not too offensive or defensive. Not too much powercreep, but enough to give Pokemon some options. Better items are introduced, most Pokemon get better movepools. It really feels like almost every mon has some kind of niche, even a small one.
Gen 5 is still good, but leaning too far on the HO side. Hidden abilities and team preview are nice, but the increased powerlevel of everything rewards mindless strats like DragMag, VoltTurn, and Fightingspam. And that's not even getting into weather dominance.
Gen 6 cranks up the powercreep even harder, to the point where if something was niche before, it's just unusable now. It's also the point where I'm pretty sure GF started adding busted shit on purpose.
Gen 7 is a weird one where it's not centralized enough, rather than too centralized. This sounds good, but it means that anti-meta picks to counter certain common mons aren't viable because nothing is common enough to justify dedicating a teamslot to countering. Which means that innovation isn't rewarded and you're better off just using generally good mons.
Gen 8's dexcut was a good idea in theory, but terrible in practice. Especially when they added so much more broken shit that the old broken shit seems reasonable in comparison.
