For those worried about exclusives, that's where making a Pokémon Go account will probably come in handy. Pokémon go doesn't have version exclusives, and since you can Port the Pokémon over to Let's Go and Pokémon go is free to play, it makes it doable without having to buy a whole new system. Plus, if you get the pokeball accessory thing, it can catch Pokémon while you're walking like in Go, so you don't have to keep your phone out all day looking for an ekans. You can also evolve Pokémon without trading
This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Without online capabilities you can't easily trade for version exclusives, which essentially necessitates you to get GO. GO might not be a direct requirement but it might as well be by the looks of it. GameFreak doesn't seem to understand that the only reason GO was even popular to begin with was that it was free itself on a system that a lot of people already had, plus it fed on nostalgia from Pokémon, that combination made it popular among a casual crowd. However, the people that did not have the right smartphone to play it didn't get a new phone just for GO, it wasn't worth that. I don't have the right smartphone to play GO, so for me this game seems like it would be a very heavy investment to actually get the full experience, and that doesn't appeal to the casual crowd. The Switch is expensive, coop seems to require a TV too and TVs are expensive. Smartphones are expensive.
Trading locally for version exclusives might have been acceptable back in the days of the first generations, but the world has changed. People no longer communicate solely with people in their own neighbourhood, people communicate globally, friendships are formed globally, through social media platforms, forums, and other places on the internet. Who is going to fly to the other side of the world just to trade for version exclusive pokémon or do a battle? Pokémon changed along with the changing world by introducing global trading and battling over the internet, it makes no sense to regress back.
Another thing that really scares me is the lack of wild pokémon battles. I just don't understand why they'd remove that. Gyms were removed in gen7 but we got Grand Trials which were the same thing, just outside instead of inside a gym building. Wild pokémon battles are necessary to level up pokémon if you somehow got behind, or if a boss battle is turning out tougher than expected, it balances out the difficulty curve. I usually play with around 20-30 pokémon in the main story and I need to grind from time to time so I don't get too far behind in levels. Apparently you need to catch pokémon instead of battling them to grind for levels in this game. That's just weird, it essentially turns the entire world into a safari zone and changes pokémon catching from a game where you need to weaken the wild pokémon enough to catch them, but not so much that you faint them, into a simple dice roll. And dice rolls aren't interesting on their own. You need to have some sort of ability to influence your odds to make it interesting. I think it's just going to be very frustrating to see the wild pokémon escape your balls time and time again when you just want to level up your pokémon, and you can't even weaken the wild pokémon to increase your odds, only spend a lot more in-game currency to get better balls. And it doesn't even make much logical sense that if you don't even fight the wild pokémon first that your own pokémon suddenly get stronger from
you throwing balls at another wild pokémon.
Admittedly, I'm not the target audience. I don't have GO, I don't have a Switch, I don't have local friends that are into pokémon more than just playing GO (certainly not enough for them to invest in a Switch + game), and online battling is a large portion of why I even enjoy pokémon. If they kick that out there's little end-goal for me to actually raise my pokémon. Honestly, most of what I've heard so far about these games isn't appealing to me, and that'd be fine if this was just a side-game like Magikarp Jump or whatever, but GameFreak says this is a main-series game, and I understand that as it being somewhat representative of where they want to take the franchise next.