That's because Metapod is cocoon. Cocoons are supposed to look completely different from the final form. Dragonair and Graveler are not cocoons. Btw, Dragonair and Dragonite are completely different. Dragonair is a serpent, Dragonite is a chubby dinosaur with some tiny wings. They have completely different color schemes too.

I haven't kept us with the last few gens of Pokemon but every now and then I see an image of some weird ass looking thing and I find out later that it's actually a Pokemon. I like the simplistic designs so in my eyes they've just gotten worse since gen 1.

Gen 3 > Gen 6 > Gen 4 > Gen 7 > Gen 2 > Gen 1 > Gen 5

Gen 1 might be the least creative, but gen 5 had way more boring and forgettable Pokémon.

The first Pokemon was the best Pokemon game imo.

I don't have a lot of experience with Pokémon, but from what I've seen, gen 2 is the worst by far. Gen 1 might be boring and have some questionable gameplay design choice, but overall, its Pokémon design is fairly solid.

Gen 6 and Gen 7 had such good Pokemon...because there were less and there was more emphasis on quality rather than quantity. It shouldn't come to surprise at all that the Pokemon felt more memorable as a result. They could afford to go this route since there was already 500+ Pokemon in the dex, so adding another 100 Pokemon wasn't exactly necessary, and they could be more careful and clever with design. Gen 1 couldn't, it needed the quantity as the first title in the series.

There are about as many good Pokemon in Gen 7 as Gen 1, because Gen 1 had so many. And I'd say at least 40 of the Gen 1 Pokemon had good design.

It's kind of unfair to make these comparisons unless you condense the sample size of Gen 1...and you can't.

Switch 4 and 1 and you have my ranking. 

Gen 2 still sucks the most money wisr

you have to take into account that the OP was -5 years old when Gen one was a thing, by the time he was old enough to walk/talk/post on the internet, the concept of a pokemon which must make allowances to be male/female do not make sense to him because when he was born the Nintendo DS and PSP were on the Horizon, the concept of a game being limited by a 4mhz processor is hard to take into account when you have something close to a portable PS2 available by the time he can talk.

This makes me feel old to say, but I must now understand why people would sigh and roll their heads when classic films are criticized by people on youtube in 2018

@OP though, you say the region must be full of spoons for all those Kadabra/Alakazam I'm fairly sure in Gen 1 only a Gym leader has more than one Kadabra and most certainly an Alakazam, perhaps if you did find the Kadabra in the wild and defeated it they simply would pick up the spoon of their fallen friend to focus their powers on you... (also they just wanted something to look like Uri Geller as without the spoons he would just look like an anteater, easy to add those in 8bit hardware to convey that the pokemon has psychic power ties)

Yikes. I obviously don't mean all Pokemon 4 and after look bad. I just don't like the majority of the designs. Only people online would assume I mean that LITERALLY every Pokemon after gen 3 has a poor design lol.