Sαpphire
Johto Champion
I know this question wasn't directed at me, but there is something that sticks out as being noticeably worse about SM than BDSP and that's the region design. SM has an extremely linear, "follow the Yellow Brick Road" sort of region design. The overworld areas don't really have much in the way of detours to explore (and every time they do, it's something quick and small) and there's a rigid order in which you visit the areas. They outright block areas they don't want you exploring with NPCs. Meanwhile DPPtBDSP has some level of linearity, but not to the degree of SM. There's entire swaths of routes or areas that are optional or detours so the progression isn't as straightforward. You even get to choose whether to fight Maylene or Crasher Wake first, whereas you get to a similar situation with Akala Island in SM and might think "I want to go fight Lana, Kiawe, and Mallow in whatever order I want" but nope, the game has you fight Lana, then Kiawe, then Mallow and has you take a roundabout path through Akala again constantly blocked by NPCs to force you to fight them in that order. And there's a lot more mazelike design, especially in the dungeons and gym puzzles. It just makes it all much more satisfying to navigate and explore and feels more realistic than SM's system of "okay, you're going to go to A, then B, then C and no other order".
I can respect criticisms of the Alola region's linearity. I might think BDSP are worse games, but I certainly acknowledge that Sinnoh in all its forms - and much like older regions, prior to Kalos and Alola and Galar - is probably more interesting thanks to its loops, its optional areas, and its sense of freedom. I think one of the best parts of Sinnoh is being able to change up the gym order and to choose whether to explore certain places. Sun and Moon - more the latter, really - appealed to me because I was sucked into the characters and story, but that also doesn't make for as much replayability as games that don't direct you as much. With Sun and Moon it takes hours just to get to the point where you can simply customize your character, let alone go in any direction not explicitly mandated.Pokemon Sun was the first and only time I ever got to the end credits of a Pokemon game and felt absolutely zero emotion whatsoever - the game just failed to be an immersive gameplay experience for me and ended up turning me off an entire generation. IIRC some of the things that factored into this were the excessive levels of handholding and linearity (like, I remember quite a few of the routes were basically empty corridors), and this was a big deal for someone who values exploration in these sorts of games (@Bolt the Cat covered this issue nicely in the above post). As well as this, there were all those unskippable cutscenes for a story that (IMO) was nowhere near good enough to 'intrude' the way it did, and this also made the Melemele Island section very tedious to play through.
BDSP could be a chore to play, I won't lie, but at the end of the day they're still remakes of my favorite generation and I'm deeply fond of Sinnoh - so even when it was a slog, I attribute it more to my disappointment at the underwhelming direction they took this remake and that I had literally played this (almost) exact same game multiple times before - the music and the locations and the Pokemon that I loved were still there and the rematches were genuinely pretty fun to go into blind.
By the way, I should mention that when I say SM are the worst games, I'm referring only the games that I've completed - I haven't finished LGPE, SwSh or PLA (former two I probably never will) and I never bought USUM.