I'm unsure if I made this point in this thread specifically, and I do confess that I don't know much about game design, but please don't be so hard on Game Freak. I, personally, will not be buying Sword and Shield because I'm fed up with the lack of quality, but I think there's actually a reasonable explanation.
I Googled the amount of staff Game Freak has, and they only have 143 staff members. Furthermore, they've divided themselves up a little. Between Let's Go, Town, and Sword & Shield, I'm pretty sure that a very small amount of those 143 staff members have actually worked on Sword & Shield. What's worse is, despite the fact that the games don't seem to be the most profitable aspect of the Pokemon franchise, they
are the centerpoint of the canon. The anime, the TCG, the manga adaptations and what not all rely on the games. Because of this, Game Freak has no choice but to release Sword and Shield at this point in time.
Now, personally, even though I'm not going to get Sword and Shield, I have two personal ideas for what Game Freak should do in order to rectify a controversy like this:
- Enlist the help of Creatures Inc. again - I have checked Google, and I looked up Creatures Inc., who usually co-develops significant entries in the Pokemon series. According to the Wikipedia article, they didn't work on Sword and Shield. However, they did make the models for X and Y. So, assuming that Wikipedia is correct, Creatures Inc. had no part in working on Sword and Shield, leaving Game Freak to have no choice but to redo everything on their own. Creatures Inc. also made the models for Pokemon Go and Pokken Tournament, but not Sun and Moon. Let's hope for the best that they return to work on the next Pokemon game, because Game Freak needs that help.
- Stop with the annual release cycle - Despite the point I mentioned earlier, with the Pokemon games being the crux of the canon, Game Freak will have breathing room, or at least they SHOULD. They do annual releases, which I don't think is smart at all. Generation 4 had Diamond/Pearl, Platinum, and Heart Gold/Soul Silver released with pretty decent gaps between each other. They could do a repeat of that. 3DS was a bit more rapid fire. It feels like the games came a lot quicker in that era. I'm going to hope for the best and assume that Game Freak will do a wide gap between the remake of Diamond and Pearl, the next Let's Go game, the updated version of Sword/Shield, whatever the next mainline Pokemon is, they should give themselves a lot more time to work on it now.
TL;DR - Game Freak is understaffed big-time, and quite frankly Sword and Shield just wasn't something they'd be able to do considering the circumstances, like the fact that the games are the prime source of the canon that the anime and other adaptations base themselves on. So cut them a bit of slack. Let's cross our fingers that they can get their stuff together for the next entry.