At the end of the day, every single Pokemon game's campaign is aimed at kids, maybe aside from the Gamecube titles that seem to be aimed more at young teenagers, of course their story and characters will be simplistic, and their villains one note.
I don't have a problem with stories being simplistic or targeted at kids, it's absolutely possible to tell a simplistic story targeted towards kids and still be good and/or interesting. Pokemon as a franchise isn't even a stranger to this since Spike Chunsoft was able to pull it off with Red/Blue Rescue Team and Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. What really baffles me with gen 5's story is that they picked such a complex topic of discussion in the context of the in-game world about the morality and ethics of catching Pokemon as if a child is going to have the capacity to engage with or process the arguments any of these people are making in any meaningful way.
Even one note characters aren't necessarily bad if they're executed well or are at least entertaining to watch, gen 7's story suffers a lot by trying to make the characters seem dimensional by attempting to get the players to sympathize with Lusamine's family situation (despite her being a fucking sociopath) or thinking character development is a sufficient condition to make characters interesting. It doesn't matter that Lillie becomes more confident by the end of gen 7, she still does fuck all and the only interesting thing about her is the legendary Pokemon hiding in her bag.
On the topic of the metagame I agree gen 5 had an interesting power struggle with the weather, but gen 7's meta was pretty fucking shit. Every team was running 2 or 3 tapus and a mega, which made a lot of matchups feel incredibly stale. Megas as a whole are a shit mechanic in terms of team building since you're dedicating a team slot to a small pool of Pokemon who can mega evolve (unless you're gimping yourself for fun) which results in less variety in team compositions. Power creeping mechanics and abilities are an incredibly lazy and uninteresting way to develop a metagame and gen 7 was the culmination of that before the absurdity of the Pokemon from gen 8 and especially gen 9.
Although I don't see the metagame as a big selling point for me, if I really wanted to play competitive Pokemon I can just play showdown. Pokemon has the potential to be mechanically interesting but Game Freak has never capitalized on these mechanics outside of the now MIA battle frontier. Instead of slowly introducing new mechanics and challenges through rival battles and gyms, they teach you how to play rock paper scissors 12 times. It doesn't matter how mechanically rich Pokemon is because game freak refuses to capitalize off it outside of competitive, which is still a high bar of entry and an enormous time sink if you plan on playing it legitimately.
Contrast this with a game like Persona which utilizes its much simpler battle system incredibly well in the sense that each fight contributes to the overall attrition of your SP and HP or Monster Hunter Stories which adapts the players ability to recognize and respond to monster attacks and behaviors like in the core series and rewards players with early access to stronger and rarer monsters for mastering the smaller nuanced mechanics to win against tougher optional fights, like party members being unable to fall below 1 hp when performing a double attack or while riding. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have games like Library of Ruina and Chrono Ark which are unabashedly open with their complex battle systems and challenges to create incredibly difficult but compelling gameplay. With Pokemon it's the worst of both worlds, you have a battle system with so much potential for interesting strategies and challenges, but instead every challenge boils down to rock paper scissors, except you already know your opponent is going to play scissors, so its just a matter of identifying which type is equivalent to playing rock. Repeat this 12 times until the champion fight. This design as well as the level curve being incredibly fucked leads to so many unfulfilling battles that are often trivialized by one Pokemon.
As much as I'd like to praise gen 5 opening up a lot of weather based synergy, Game Freak sure as fuck didn't utilize it in their main game. I'm not going to praise a game because it has the potential to be interesting outside of the core experience of the game as a whole that's only really gonna be tapped into by the niche group of people who play these games competitively. It doesn't make the lackluster characters, progression, and challenges any less terrible. I agree that the collection aspect is the only worthwhile thing the series has to offer now, but even that's been fucked up by cutting out Pokemon and making you store them on their shitty mobile app if you want to have any hope of importing your collections to future games, as well as the declining quality of the designs with shit like fucking Flamigo or retreading old designs for the umpteenth time so Weezing can have a stupid ass hat.
tl;dr pokemon been poopy bad for a while now and it make me not happy
no stalker you can not lower your attack stat. Enjoy Foul Play stalker.