>>53166055lack of game directors willing to take on Z would be my guess
Platinum and B2W2 were both one-offs by two different directors, Morimoto did both Emerald and HGSS before also proceeding to fuck off to do exclusively lesser roles like the other two.
Masuda was pretty much done with mainline games after XY, so in terms of (pokemon) game directors within GF that'd leave only Ohmori, and naturally he was far more interested in creating his own shitty games than Z.
the only other pokemon directors I can think of, Iwao, had to be appointed by Ohmori for USUM, so doubtful he was even considering the idea of directing a third version prior to that happening. the director behind SwSh's DLC, Tani, got into GF only after gen6 had been already wrapped up, so he wasn't even around back when Z might have been still on the table.
take what I say with a grain of salt, considering most of this is just speculation on my part
