This game does evolve and do fun new things, but in differing places. The Wild Area over the routes, the Dynamaxing over the normal non-dynamax battles, and the online co-op in raid battles over the online trading/battling. It feels like they tried doing multiple things at once but couldn't quite figure things out.

I can say this though. I'm absolutely confident that because people were begging GF to get a Gen 8 game out in 2018, (or heck, even 2017 with the Pokemon Stars stuff) they briefly shifted priority for a few months into wrapping up Let's Go as a stop gap to appease their investors/TPC so they could have another free year to work on the game. The fact that the investor reports noted Pokemon SWS as "For 2018 or later" indicated just that to me.

I'm legitimately terrified that we could have seriously had these games launch last year and thus have an XY repeat where there's just no game to speak of outside of endless wifi battles, and while I'm very happy with how these turned out I also feel an extra year might have been enough to add some bonus stuff for the extremely hardcore fans. I'd at least hope if they make any sort of expansion they do it with an actual UPDATE or DLC instead of a stupid pair of third versions like USUM, or do it the right way with sequels. I too, hope that GF gets a much needed gap year and break and I hope TPC doesn't make them pump out Sinnoh remakes next year because of their demand. :|