Feel like pokemon's first blunder was making starters past gen 4. They havent managed to make a good batch of starters where everyone likes all of them its seems like just one is popular and the other two are disliked. They should have just started looping them starting in gen 5. I think the normies main issue with gen 5 was its ugly starters and it would have saved its reputation during that era if it had used the gen 1 starters instead