Tbh I thought it was understood that the fandom's main issue with the 3D transition was the animations and not the models themselves. I cannot recall a single instance of people complaining about model quality outside faded colors like you mention, but that's a texturing issue if anything.And if we're being real, the 3D models themselves aren't unsalvageable as people say. They need idle animations (and some real color saturation).
As an aside, it's entirely possible that the reason the 3D models have very subdued idle animations in battle (outside of the obvious "they weren't given enough time to animate over 600 Pokémon for Gen 6") is due to performance issues. The Gen 6 and Gen 7 games already don't run well during battle because iirc the Pokémon models are super high poly, so minimizing animation when you have 2+ mons on screen probably helped prevent the games from tanking frames even further.
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