Just A Seaking first and foremost I appreciate the in-depth post, I wish more of the "big pokemon communities" did their homeworks instead of just peperaging on the internet.
That said, as you probably figured, with "community" i'm just speaking about the big echo chambers that are the big reddits, the big twitch chats, the various clickbait big sites, etc. It's pretty obvious that people with more than 3 braincells won't just go throwing death threats to GameFreaks for not including their favourite in a game, but as you know, that happened, and this is a similar situation, where the big angry pointless noise is so big that it covers the few voices of reasons.
My opinion of "Using AI art" is that I don't care. I know that the CEO of the company is a big advocate of AI art (incidentally learned it from one of the articles about Palworld) and I'm like "so?". What if they used AI art to generate some of their creatures? We're talking of a 20 bucks game that isn't pretending to be the next Skyrim and that somehow managed to even have more quality than the real Pokemon games or certain recent AAA 70 € releases of last year.
Many of their creations are blatantly and intentionally pokemon parodies, it's the whole point. As I said, one of their thumbnails is literally a bunch of "not-wooloos" with machineguns.
What annoys me is the entitlement that "only Pokemon can do monster collection".
Using inspired or even """stolen""" (with a lot of commas cause they arent, they're still different enough, your typical "copy the homeworks but make them a bit different" meme) isn't exactly uncommon in indies and minor companies, and in worst case they get asked to change some of the designs (es; Vampire Survivors, one of the biggest indie sellers of last year, had assets blatantly stolen by Castlevania, they got demanded to change them by the copyright owners, and they changed them and that was it).
The entitlement that "hah anyone could do a better Pokemon game" and then as soon as someone does another game that features pokemon-looking creatures, suddently they must be set on fire and *pokemon fans seek vengeance*. But I thought Pokemon design sucked and were uninspired? That the design of last 5 gens were lazy and boring and even a five year old would do better?
Even this very thread is full of people complaining of designs and how anyone can do better, and of how people wish other companies tackled the monster collecting genre. Why is it suddently a heresy that someone else does?
AND the entitlement that apparently this game must exist specifically to kill Pokemon.
Why exactly? It's not a competitor, it's not even same genre. TemTem if anything is a direct competitor since it's literally same game type, turn based monster collector battle game mainly focused on PvP battles.
You don't see any other franchise being THIS anal when it comes to parodies or clones. At least, I don't recall having ever seen other fanbases manage to be at same time super possessive and derogative of the franchise, which as I said, at same time both sucks and is also the very best for some reason.