Yeah and there's nothing stopping them from making a separate franchise with the IP that tries to realize that dream, leaving the "meta" in tact for those who enjoy repetition. In fact they've shown they're capable of getting out of their box by making weird spin offs that cater to very small slices of the audience.
I really can't think of a more monied publisher/IP that has continued to not attempt to deliver on what has been widely seen as the ideal vision for over 20 years. Even Square is willing to try and fail answering to the FF7 remake clamor.
I get the idea of wanting the good days to keep rolling on. But you make it sound as if its a weird outside cliche that is pushing for a big update on the formula that does justice to its vision (i.e. a significantly more open pokemon game). From what I have seen it seems the community is split 50/50 on this.
A big part of what makes Pokemon great (for me) is that it is a jrpg where you can go out and find your party through exploration, and have millions of different party combinations. I think there is a lot of things that they can do to make this exploration better, having persistent Pokemon on the map was one, having a more open world is a second.