characters that talk to you for maybe 10 minutes, or the whole game and still be extremely underdeveloped or forced"
Actually in my opinion the character and story writing in Sun and Moon (while still pretty bad when compared to many other RPGs) were the best this series ever had, alongside some badly needed world building (Trial Captains have more purpose to their existence than those gym leaders that apparently sit around their gyms all day). Except Hau, maybe, I don't really know which characters in S/M felt underdeveloped or forced. The "rival posse" in X/Y was very bad, but that was actually a failed experiment to bring more character to the NPCs in Pokemon. And the further back you go in the generations the more forced, underdeveloped, wooden and pointless the characters and plot become. A lot of the original/earlier NPCs are only popular because of the personalities the anime provided for them.
The story in Pokemon has always been a poorly disguised excuse plot, though they have gotten better at hiding that in the more recent generations. Lillie was a fully realized character, Kukui was a professor who does more than standing around in his lab, the trial captains and kahunas had aspirations and interests that weren't primarily tied to their existence as trial captains and were encountered outside of their trial grounds frequently.
There are a lot of elements that kind of hamper the story telling in Pokemon (the silent player-avatar, the static gym/trial->E4 structure, the evil team/box legendary formula) but those are present since early on not recent.
To me it seems pretty clear that Gamefreak tries to put more story and character into Pokemon, but might not be that successful (yet) due to a number of reasons.
Imho they should focus on giving us a proper "game" before they start with the "post game"What are the meatier "post games" in Pokemon anyway? Pretty much just some legendary hunting and a battle facility. Woooo... Riveting...
stream rolling through the story
I will say that these games feel shorter than when I was a little kid. But I dunno how much of that is subjective. Sometimes when I return to other games I've played as a young child, I notice that I only take half the in-game time (or less) than I needed as a kid and what felt like huge story sections to my young mind are really just short episodes. It's the same with difficulty.
In addition I have the suspicion that a lot of the supposed "length" and "difficulty" of Red and Blue was really just bad game design. Sure, it took rather long and was rather difficult to get to Cinnabar Island in R/B/Y, but was it the enjoyable kind of length and difficulty? Nope, it was a boring, grueling chore during which you fought Tentacool after Tentacool every two steps. Same with the caves and dungeons.
The often celebrated second half of Gold/Silver was
empty as far as plot goes, even when compared to R/B, badly balanced and had you pointlessly roam around in a version of Kanto that was so stripped down that it felt like the region had undergone a horrible economic, cultural and environmental decline.
Now there are some legitimate complains as far as the difficulty goes (Missing difficulty setting, a lot of important trainers lack full teams) but the older games had a lot of "fake difficulty/longevity".
Of course all those things still should improve, but these problems are not necessarily new for Pokemon or an element of the most recent generations only.
