Pokémon - Why are we still here...? Just to suffer...

"Moving on" doesn't make the current state of affairs any less lamentable.

The reason the older fans are represented here as disillusioned and cynical isn't because they somehow outgrew the thing they loved, but the rather that the thing they loved was slowly dumbed-down and run into the ground over a number of years.

The older games are still fun, and not just due to nostalgia. Starting with X/Y, the developers started introducing alarming amounts of hand-holding, cheap gimmicks and game-breaking mechanics that made it hard to actually lose, and removed much of the challenge and reward of the earlier games.

If I have kids, I'm not raising them on the newer stuff. They're going to have to bullshit their way through(or around) the Seafoam Islands like everyone else.

"the thing they loved was slowly dumbed-down and run into the ground over a number of years."

It's funny the counter-argument to this I usually see is "the old games weren't hard either, you were just a kid"

which ignores the very obvious response of "ok, then why do they continue to drastically reduce the difficulty?". Props to B/W2 for attempting to include difficulty options even if in the stupidest possible way.