I find it funny that Ruby and Sapphire are so maligned. The game is actually awesome, the region of Hoenn is one of the best, right up there with Johto (better than Kanto). The region has so much beauty and variety; clearly a lot of effort was put into making it more than just 'town here...path...town here'. There are long routes full of tall grass and rain (new at the time), towns made of treehouses, towns floating on logs, a town inside a crater accessed by diving in the sea and resurfacing in its lake...it had so much imagination.
By contrast, Diamond/Pearl's Sinnoh region is a joke. It's so bland, uninteresting and largely very characterless. The only reason people prefer D/P to R/S is that the DS has been so huge and the games have Wi-Fi.