Speaking about the Wild Area, I felt there should have been some story within the Wild Area, with other characters going in and out of it. Rather, we have only one scene set there, in which Bede taunts Hop and the two run offscreen. It makes the Wild Area seem like something that was added on without some other departments' knowledge rather than an organic part of the world. The towns may be small, but they do at least feel full of life, partially because there are a lot of NPCs in all of them and because story happens in almost all of them (Ballonlea is the only one where it doesn't--you just go to the stadium, finish the challenge, and leave).
Alola's routes were also on the short side, though they felt longer because you met recurring characters there, and some facilities were located on them. Some even had Pokémon Centers. Would've liked the routes to be more like Galar Route 9, which is quite rich and fun because it actually IS quite long and hadsmultiple segments that play differently and have different Pokémon.
But yeah, all in all, this game felt rushed for the holidays, which is a shame because everything felt like they had a lot more planned for it and that this turned out pretty far from how Masuda and Ohmori and Turner and such envisioned this game to be.
Something I want to point out though, is that while the story for
X and Y were some of the weakest (and I'd say they're worse than
Sword and Shield, as I found most of the protagonist's kid posse insufferable due to them being one-dimensional characters who never develop--except Tierno, whom I liked the most because of that), I found Kalos to be one of the best from an artistic standpoint. Every route felt distinct from each other, all of the towns were absolutely beautiful (something I would say the same of for Galar, really, and Galar does a better job of maing every town look very different from each other), and the music was top-notch. It's why I felt disappointed that places like Coumarine Town and Dendemille Town had very little reason to return to, and it's because they're such beautiful, scenic locations. I have the same disappointment with places like Ballonlea and Spikemuth. They're very pretty, but they're also horrendously underused.
I mentioned how Poni Island did it way better. The Wild Area could have had more varying biomes (caves, coves, marsh, woods). The should've extended into a coastline. There could've been a small settlement in there, or scattered trainers you could battle.
SWSH, however, feels like a Chapter 1. It felt like it'll have a sequel rather than a 3rd version. With Bede and Marnie being new Gym Leaders, Sonia being a new professor and Hop studying to be one as well. Then all the other Gym Leader uniforms being available. Then the datamine pointing to two more Legendary/Mythical Pokemon after Eternatus.
The hand-drawn Galar map actually shows a coastline in the Wild Area to the southwest of Watchtower Ruins. In the game as it is, there is no southwest at all. It seems the train going from the Wild Area Station to Motostoke Station would've passed along a bridge that went over the Wild Area. (There also appears to be a building along the train tracks between Galar Mine 1 and Motostoke, though I'm guessing that wound up in-game as the inaccessible power plant visible along Route 4 that Sonia spoke of.)