@TheLightSpirit I think there's been a massive misreading from folks. Team 1 gets the "priority" but rather in a way that opportunity seem specifically to pertain in basically "being allowed to experiment a heck ton no matter if it succeeds or fail".

If you look closely, and especially at that comment, the whole goal of Team 1 seems not to be to "supplant" Pokemon but rather to supplement it as a skill/talent building opportunity and initiative for in-house employees:

"When you’re a programmer working on Pokémon, you’re one of many programmers. However, as a director on Giga Wrecker the experience opened my eyes to the other aspects of game creation, all the way up to users playing the game.

I can now bring that knowhow back to the Pokémon team and try to create something different for Pokémon. It’s a good synergy between Gear Project and Pokémon creation."

And if you read okay you can see how massive a misreading the headline "GameFreaks is trying to create something more exciting than Pokemon" is when rather it should be "GameFreaks has in-house initiatives and opportunities to cultivate and diversify the talents of their own employees and teams".

So if you check closely Team 1 isn't there to replace Team 2 but rather to serve as a (perhaps even sometimes rather wild) test lab for employees to acquire skills in new area(such as a "mere" cog-in-the-machine programmer getting a stab at director positions) that can then be fed back in the "production line" approach of Team 2 in more controlled fashion.

And honestly you see how the games have evolved, subtly but still evolved, a little every single titles with side-mechanics that came and went and a couple of times actually ended up staying up to to this day... and I wouldn't be surprised if these subtle tweaks weren't the indirect results of Team 1 employees coming back in Team 2 fresh of their experience.

Sure the games haven't moved that much in decades but... to a degree I would argue it's by design and purpose.

People know what they're getting from a pokemon games. Be them the casual players just looking to complete the next gym while adding to their pokedex at a leasurely pace. Or the hardcore players devouring entire blog posts about base stats, IVs and EVs and obscure side-mechanics and breeding powerguides in the attempts to create the ultimate duel pokemon.

With the bonus of that hardcore competitive appeal(something lacking in the example I'm about to cite, I would daresay that what Pokemon achieved was basically doing worldwide what SquareEnix achieved with Dragon Quest in Japan.

And to many degrees... it IS because they've kept so close to a formula and at the same time exactly why they have to be careful with it. Because it's what brings enough money as an IP to make Team 1 and so many other things possible.

As to be blunt?

It is THE premier highest grossing franchise on the planet right now. And I mean, it's crazy how much it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises

The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe? Worth less than pokemon.

Mario? Worth less than pokemon and yet that's despite being worth more than the MCU.

Marvel as an entity might be technically bigger but only because technically it operates through owning multiple properties and most of the biggest ones are still individually worth less than Pokemon itself is to Games Freak. Even a crossover IP like Avengers remains worth less(and in many ways, it's the fact all these IPs are so fragmented rather than consolidated that made it such that you could have such a thing as the IP split between the MCU movies and the Sony Marvel Movies for so long).

Which is what makes Team 1 possible. Pokemons is so big of an IP that Games Freaks can afford to create multitude of experimental IPs without even needing any of them to "succeed" because it still remains a perfect incentive to retain employees and allow them to develop new skillsets, talents and experiences that can be fed back throughout the company rather than kept exclusively within the halls of Team 1.