I think it has to do less with Game Freak and more to do with the expected turnaround time on these games. Since the franchise as a whole is on a strict schedule, they have to cut corners and sacrifice polish for the games to be ready on time. Just compare the development time on this game vs Breath of the Wild(s). I really do think they are setting themselves up for criticism though. It’s effectively a clone of a 4 year old game but with a fraction of the development time. So while the consumers will expect “progress” to happen between designing of BotW and this game, any shared mechanic between the two games will probably be inferior simply because of the development time allocated. It’s a game that is naturally up for comparison to BotW and if it doesn’t at least meet the same level of quality a ton of people will be disappointed by default. Perhaps rightfully so.
Pokemon games will always be fun because the basic game mechanics are so good. But it’s clear there’s a lot of fan disappointment with this strategy of making the game “just good enough”. It’s antithetical to the basic principles that Nintendo tends to follow of always striving to produce a high-quality and polished game - basically the reason they are where they are today. It’s easy to sympathize with the Pokemon franchise though, they need the constant stream of games to keep the money printers on. It doesn’t make sense to double the development time and sacrifice the opportunity cost of selling related merchandise just to make a game that will sell equally well a bit better. Ultimately though, I think it’s a bit of a short-sighted decision that will sacrifice the long-term reputation of the video game branch of the franchise.
What they really need to do is find a sustainable way to produce high quality games on a strict schedule. I don’t have the answer as to how to do that, maybe it involves scaling back a lot of the features you would typically expect in a pokemon game and focusing on a more basic mechanic. In a way, this is what this game is doing. I’m happy they broke the standard Pokemon model for this game, the video games have been getting stale and cluttered with legacy features that overall drags the quality down. That being said, I stand by my original post here that my expectations for this game are on the ground floor and I am happy to be proven wrong.