>>50749256>why do people think that Pokemon Z should've happened?It was a time where the National Dex was a still a thing. Standards were different.
XY are also games that are superficially flawed due to a lack of perceived polish and content especially coming off of BW2. Compare that to SM which were fundamentally flawed games that couldn't be fixed without a complete rework from the ground up.
You could also make the argument that XY (and ORAS) could have been perfectly fine with a single DLC expansion that unified the generation and added the skipped content like the battle frontier, Zygarde's dummied out forms or Eternal Floette. Meanwhile the best that SM could reasonably have gotten was a restored gym challenge from the beta and a national dex expansion, but of course they didn't oblige on either of those because they were conscious decisions to be left out of Gen 7 in order to set the bar that low.
