I highly disagree. One of the biggest changes introduced in these remakes was the addition of the Vs. Seeker, which allowed for regular trainer rematches. That made it easier to level up, as well as far easier to earn more money, which was quite tedious to do in R/G/B/Y.
These remakes also got rid of many glitches and oversights that plagued the originals, not to mention all the new additions that were carried over from R/S such as Natures, Abilities, and Berries. I'd at least like to know which aspect of R/G/B/Y you found to be outdated and weren't fixed in these games.
This is what I still find to be outdated about RBY:
1. The Kanto Dex. They insist on sticking with the original 151 for nostalgia, but that's terrible variety by modern standards. Too many types have limited options which makes team building difficult both for the players who might have trouble finding a varied team of Pokemon they like, and for the bosses that are type specialist. The Elite 4 rosters are a prime example of the latter, they have Agatha and Lance specializing in Ghost and Dragon but there's only 1 Ghost and 1 Dragon in the Kanto Dex so they just fill them with Pokemon that vaguely relate to those types but aren't. Bad type distribution, you should be able to form a team of 6 different fully evolved Pokemon for each type, and while that wasn't really possible in the original games, that's much more possible in 3rd gen but they just choose to lock anything that didn't exist in the original to post game. The remakes need beefy expansions similar to what third versions tend to get, not a handful of cross gen evos that barely move the needle. And FRLG didn't even get the latter.
2. The map designs. They look a lot more archaic now after the series has transitioned to 3D, but even compared to 3rd gen, many of Kanto's map designs look too simplistic because of various limitations in the GB hardware. The level design was flat as a pancake and they only really used ledges to give any semblance of height, meanwhile in Hoenn you have much more mountainous areas like Mt. Chimney, Rt. 119, and Mt. Pyre which show much more realistic changes in elevation. It would've been great to see them make Mt. Moon, Rock Tunnel, and the surrounding areas to feel similarly mountainous but nope, they still design them to be flat as a pancake as in the GB games. Several routes in Kanto were extremely short and could be crossed in seconds, most notably Rt. 7, Rt. 16, and Rt. 18, almost leaving me to wonder why these routes even exist. Environmental variety is also still extremely limited, with Kanto mainly having generic fields, caves, and water routes whereas Hoenn's areas had much more variety and character to them. Why does say, Rt. 5 feel like the exact same environment of Rt. 8 instead of feeling like slightly different takes on grassy field routes? I will give them credit for making Seafoam Islands a proper ice cave, but what about Cinnabar Island? That's a volcanic island as we found out in GSC, but where's the volcano that erupts in 3 years? They experimented with a bit more of this in the Sevii Islands, but they refused to make these kinds of improvements in the original areas.
3. The story and characters. RS took a big step forwards with the storyline by giving its evil team a coherent motive and an overarching plot building up to that motive. Say what you want about the apocalyptic plotlines of evil teams like Magma/Aqua, at least every encounter with them felt related to their goal of expanding the land/sea and that they were slowly building up to the climax where they free Groudon/Kyogre to wreak havoc. Team Rocket, on the other hand, their encounters felt totally random and unrelated to each other to the point where to be brutally honest, the storyline in RBY feels practically nonexistent. They're generic bad guys with shallow motivations of ruling the world that show up at random places throughout Kanto doing random, seemingly unconnected things (if you do a bit of digging in the lore you can see that this isn't quite the case, but the average person isn't going to feel this in the actual encounters with them), building up to their climactic encounter of.. invading a business for a special Poke Ball? On top of that, Magma/Aqua started fleshing things out a bit by adding admin ranks to their organizations (and GSC also had Rocket Executives, but they were the de facto leaders of Team Rocket in that game, so I can't really count them), but they didn't really add Rocket Admins/Executives to RBY and once again everyone that wasn't Giovanni was a random grunt.
4. Side activities. RS stepped things up by introducing Contests as a full sidequests and Secret Bases which gave you a new way to interact with other players. FRLG though, mainly stuck with minigames like the two Game Corners and Trainer Hill, which was vaguely similar to the Battle Tower in Crystal and RS. So it felt fairly regressive from RS in that aspect and once you were finished exploring the areas and catching the Pokemon, there wasn't much else to do.
5. QoL features. The Vs. Seeker was great and aa good start to improving this area, yeah. But FRLG needed a lot more than that. The Pokegear and Pokenav had multiple features to them and did more than just rematch trainers. It had Berries, but only hidden items that you could pick up on the ground and not berry trees that you could continually plant and harvest from like RS. There was no time of day or in game clock so you couldn't evolve your Eevee into Espeon or Umbreon at all. The bike lost its unique abilities from the Mach/Acro Bike and instead was just a generic bike again. A lot of these things are a bit more minor but all contributed to a feeling of regression from RS.
Granted, even in FRLG there would still be limitations and things look a LOT worse now with a game like LGPE, but there were a few more things FRLG could've done but chose not to because of nostalgia and it weighs the game down like a 5 ton anchor. There's far too elementary aspects of the game that were designed around the limitations of the GB and 1st gen that it doesn't look like it belongs on the same console even with updated graphics and battle mechanics. I wanted them to take what they learned from RS' very design and apply it to Kanto to improve more fundamental aspects of the gameplay, but instead they just want to recreate the archaic GB design almost to the letter and it's not very entertaining. I didn't find it entertaining having played it because it felt very "been there done that", and it wouldn't have been any better if I had never played the originals because the basic design elements are too restricted by the limitations of the original console (I know this because I've had similar issues with the Switch remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening when I never played the original) and it just would've felt like it couldn't measure up to RSE. So again, feels like a lot of this deserves to be thrown in the trash bin and left to history along with its native hardware and redesigned from the ground up to take advantage of what the GBA could do better.
