I was really hoping there would be new regional variants this gen. That was one of my favorite things about gen 7, and I feel very strongly that it still has a lot of untapped potential that they can & should be exploring.
It also kinda sucks that they haven't added any more megas evoltuions in like the past 4-5 years. Like I get that it's not as marketable as those giant dynamax pokemon kaiju battle things and it makes more business sense for them to keep adding cool new systems to attract people to their games rather than expand upon old features...but I still really want more mega evolutions someday too.
I disagree, I don’t think dynamaxing was a more marketable idea. Look at all the backlash and hate this has earned. Where as the Pokémon community has been extremely vocal in wanting more mega evolutions since they were introduced and ignored in gen 7. Therefore I’d say mega evolutions are very marketable. This just says to me a number of things: the decision-making at Game Freak is terrible, they are outright ignoring fans which is an extremely arrogant thing for Game Freak to do, and can risk the downfall of a franchise as we have seen with the Star Wars Battlefront reboot, the loot crate fiasco, and a plethora of other games crumbling in the last 5 or so years. That’s not to say that a fan base should dictate the whole game development, but if you aren’t catering to the fan base than how do you expect them to care enough to buy your product? It’s incredibly bizarre to me that Game Freak would so blatantly ignore the fans in favour of a lazy new gimmick and vehemently go against the interests of fans. Arrogance.
I would agree that some existing fans like the 2 of us might prefer more mega evolutions over dynamax, but they don't make these games only for existing fans of the franchise. I would assume they have shareholders to answer to like any other company and they need to show growth. I don't think it's arrogant at all for them to keep trying new things. I just don't see why it has to an either or situation and there isn't time to expand on mega evolutions as well.
I'm not sure what hate you're talking about though. I mean I've seen a lot of Wailord memes and things like that being tossed around and I'm not completely sold on Dynamax yet myself, but I haven't seen tons of outright hateful things being said about it either. The US youtube announcement video by itself has like a 90k like to 2.5 k dislike ratio, so it's definitely not something that's universally disliked I would say.