Yep, open areas offline are stable too and I maintain my view that SWSH outside of open areas is gorgeous, though battle backgrounds outside the stadiums could use a shore up
What people don't realise and continue to fail to comprehend is the comparison between Pokémon and Zelda etc.
Zelda has a dozen enemies, a dozen animals and the rest are humans
Pokémon has, at time of writing 1,274 different Pokémon and forms with the vast majority having different shape, skeletal structure and so forth. People continue to forget the scope that exists of Pokémon.
For every single tiny new feature they add, there's literally thousands of animations to make. Every time there's a new engine, there's a lot to retest and if broken, re-record, and if things catastrophically break then due to the size of it even with hundreds of animators it'd take literal years to fix so what do they do then?
Then you have moves, there's currently over 800 moves, each with animations and so smaller moves people forget end up with ho-hum animations such as Double Kick. So you have a combination of astronomical proportions which is why Pokémon only have a few specific attack animations which then activate the other attack animation
Pokémon is grander in scope than all the games people compare it to and yes, it unfortunately means a tree will have a shit texture and other parts.
People don't realise there's diminishing returns here and as much as I hate the cull, I can see it happening again and again out of sheer necessity to:
a) Make games look standard to current trends
b) Not cause overwork of staff
c) Keep the games being actually viable to continue onward
Literally no video game series has this sort of problems and the ones that come close routinely cull/rotate their monsters.
When Dexit was announced, I spoke to many game developers in the industry to try and find out what happened and pretty much each one said to me they're surprised it took so long and that it's inevitable as it's unsustainable
We're going to see the same discourse with whatever game is next due to youtubers who don't know game development and insist it's easy when it isn't.
