I think the maddening part for long time fans who feel alienated like myself is many of these problems are only problems because of GameFreak's my way or the highway attitude.

They are making a game that caters to only a specific subset of fans to the exclusion of all others when it would really not take much effort at all to make a game that pleases a much larger group of us. A big source of frustration is that with GameFreak anything more than zero effort has become too much. Like even Capcom only charged $15 to upgrade to Ultra SF4, yet here we have GameFreak charging $40 for some pretty minimal changes and a final product that IMO wouldn't have still bee a questionable $40 buy the 1st time around even if I loved the story/gameplay/etc purely on technical problems and lack of content.

The way I see it is because the Pokémon fanbase is so huge you're always going to have a subset of older players to whom the newer games appeal, but a good developer would make a game that appeals to a much wider spread of fans, and GameFreak just isn't a very good developer.