I dont expect there is going to be any amount of features that will satisfy dexit to some people, but a lot of what you've said directly contradicts what they have stated multiple times. And considering how tight lipped theyve been on ANY of their features, I understand the bitterness that comes from not knowing what they have in store. But I personally dont think anything short of a direct list of features that shows what was added in thenplace of the pokemon will placate people, and people will STILL be mad.
Even if you turn out to be right, the marketing and presentation of Dexit would still be a classic example of doing things horribly wrong. One may consider Dexit a sacrifice but exactly what is being achieved in return is still unclear. "Why does Dexit make the game better?" is still not a question that has been answered in any proper way, and if there turns out to
be such a proper answer, Game Freak should have given it immediately after announcing the Dexit policy. Continuing to be tight-lipped about it as the complaints came pouring in was even dumber. If Dexit had allowed them to do something fantastic with the remaining Pokémon, this something should have been shown immediately, to reduce concerns. Instead, concerns were allowed to grow and spread without addressing from the developers, apart from half-baked excuses.
If they were truly so lazy, wouldnt they have been able to donit with the regular team, instead of doubling the core and having 800+ more workers on top of that? If this is the lazy route, what do you expect the hard route to be? Maybe 1.5k workers? And we just...add more people whenever a new gen comes along until we have all 1k mons on a single game?
To be honest, this sort of stuff is not relevant to the consumer side. They did manage to pull together a full dex for the 3DS games, so they have demonstrated their capability to do so by example. In the transition from Gen VI to VII, they retained the catalogue of existing Pokémon while adding roughly a hundred more. It wouldn't be that much of a leap to do that same thing over again. Sure, it would cost money, but it's not completely unfeasible.
And SwSh is a title they're charging AAA money for and expecting AAA sales for, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to them that an AAA level of investment would be needed to make these games. 1.5k workers would be around
half the number of people who worked on Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that sold about as well as the Gen VII Pokémon games (SMUSUM) combined and whose asking price is about the same as that of SwSh. For the amount of money the Pokémon games generate, they have a remarkably small budget and short development time compared to other AAA video games.
Pretty much every person who has knowledge in the game industry I've seen has support of dexit, and have been surprised it hasnt happen before now.
I think it was inevitable that Dexit would happen some day, with the strategy embraced by the games until now. The accretion of content has been unsustainable, and an overhaul would have been needed one day. But the way it is approached is not so much an overhaul as a cop-out: Cut out half the Pokémon, then continue business as usual. That's the thing that makes fans so mad. Not that Dexit happened, but that it appears to have been done primarily to make it easier for the creators to work in the same veins as they have always used to.
I think i asked this before, but ill ask again: how many quality of life changes would it take to justify dexit?
The changes would have to go beyond quality of life, that's the entire point. SwSh come across as an
iteration of the Gen VII games, with marginal upgrades here and there but overall being mostly built on the same stuff as always. The game behaves the same as before both in the overworld and in battle. Apart from the stuff newly introduced in Gen VII, animations, models, and all Pokémon properties (stats, types, abilities, evolution methods/levels), appear to have been reused. The battle mechanics are still built on the framework from Gen IV. Items and the way they work have been copied over. Interaction with the environment seems to be on the same level (press A, get a textbox). The entire gameplay core of the game hasn't been changed much since Gen I, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the code has been lifted piece by piece from game to game at least since the GBA era.
In essence, the games have been upscaled and made nicer, but ultimately there haven't been any fundamental changes. A lot of the core stuff kept from earlier generations appears to have been copied and pasted, the same type of design iterations as they have done in the past. They didn't shake up the way the Pokémon games were made, but they cut out half the content nonetheless. What are we given in return?
All in all, it still remains to be seen why consumers should view Dexit as anything but a straight downgrade. Significant improvements on the remaining stock of past-gen Pokémon have not been spotted so far. The way the game is fundamentally put together has not been changed. Nothing really
warrants Dexit, apart from the desire of the creators to not increase the budget or the games' development time. Essentially, we're shown games that behave exactly like the previous entries in the series, but only contain half the Pokémon. That is a downgrade, no matter how you spin it. That can't be compensated for with simple QoL changes.
how much needs to change to justify....lets say the ballpark of 200 or so mons? I honestly want to know.
Cutting out three quarters of the Pokémon or more is the sort of thing you do if you want to build the entire game
from scratch, making all the previous content completely incopatible with the new system. The games would have to be so fundamentally different, and each included Pokémon so rich in behaviour, that anyone could see how unfeasible it would be to include more than that. We're talking overworld behaviour for every Pokémon like in Pokémon Snap, proper melee animations for contact moves in battle, a complete overhaul of all battle mechanics, that sort of thing. Heck, maybe a complete overhaul of the entire gameplay design. What I'm trying to say is, it would take a lot for me to see it as anything but a cheap cash grab like LGPE.
TL;DR - as long as the games fundamentally remain so similar to each other, because so little fundamentally changes from game to game and a lot of the content is copied directly over (and maybe adapted on the technical side so it can work like supposed to, but for the consumer it appears indistinguishable from what it used to be), Dexit comes across as a cop-out move. Iterative and incremental design has been the norm for more than 20 years, and it still evidently is the norm, so it just seems cheap that they cut out so much content without doing anything to compensate for it.