Pokemon Should Do This!

[Koh]

Koh, they aren't afraid of breaking out of their comfort zone- they don't have any incentive to. As Hoeloe's pointed out, they make a shitload of money from it; changing drastically carries the risk of failure, so they'd rather keep doing what they're doing. To be frank, the only reason the game exists at all is because of money. As a company, they have to appeal to investors, and a constant stream of money is way more appealing than someone who wants to experiment "for the art."

As far as your solutions, they would utterly break the game. If it were completely open-ended, the game would be even easier- you could just go to whatever gym was weak against whatever elements you have on hand. To be frank, Pokemon was always easy as shit, and this would just make it worse. Additionally, coders would have to spend a crapload of time on something that most kids probably won't even notice. It'd just be wasted effort, especially because if kids were having a hard time, they wouldn't try and work through it, but rather just go look for the easiest route and use that all the time.

That might actually make it lose part of it's charm, depending on what you mean by "us." You're 18 (according to your profile at least), and I don't really feel that late teens as the best target audience for it. I would probably aim the content along the lines of a Disney movie or something. There are quite a few mature jokes in the games that some miss, like that one boyfriend/girlfriend team that has the guy using an Onyx and the girl using a Cloyster. Which I guess is in line with the Special/Adventure's brand of humor.

As far as the characters, they're intended as blank slates for the player to use in place of themselves, so that could go either way. You could probably go the RPG route and have dialog options to help with giving them personality though.

The dialog change did bug me, but that was probably because Nintendo didn't want parents to complain about that again.

It's really not as hard as you guys make it sound. All it takes is some boolean arithmetic to add on the extra levels, and then a function call to make any possible evolutions should it be needed. And it wouldn't break the game; people do type match ups from the beginning of the game, so there's no change in that regard. People would find an efficient route, but there are 16777216 different combinations for 8 gym leaders, so it'd take a while to find the "best" one, but even then people would have their own preference. And this also makes the journey more PERSONAL, since you can go wherever you want. Think about it, in what world do you live in where people say there's an easter egg hunt going on (badges) and you have to get them in a certain order? You just need to get them! Who cares which one you find first or not? The games should follow the same logic.