...

I feel like this is treading to the "photo-realistic Pokemon" form of argumentation again 

No one has said that. They're just making comparisons to games that look significantly better and asking why GameFreak can't be a little more ambitious or put more effort into their works. 

Ok, yeah I can see that. There's nothing wrong with a little extra detail. Personally I would like to see them take Poke'mon into the same area of art as Valkyria Chronicles 4, Okami HD, Ni No Kuni (the first one), Yokai Watch 4, Breath of the Wild, or Dragonball FighterZ. The lack of Cell shading in the Let's Go games is kind of disappointing to me. I really don't think the style from Pokken or the look of Incineroar from Smash Ultimate would fit the series very well. Halfway between that, and a cell shaded style would though. To me the Pokken model of Fennekin's 2nd evolutino looks terrible in Pokken. She looks like she is made out of clay. Her fur doesn't look like it moves at all. As for Smash Ultimate... The extra detailed fur on Incineroar just wouldn't fit Litten at all. If you look at the smaller Pokemon in Smash Ultimate they are not nearly as detailed as Incineroar. 

There is no argument here. I'm just asking if I understand correctly what everybody wants. 

Yeah, fair enough  Just think the way you're interpreting what's being said in this thread is kind of odd ... thought maybe it was purposely disingenuous but if not eh, no big deal, I think we both already agree GameFreak are most likely not going to do it because of logistical reasons. 

Don't Creatures Inc co-develop the main generation RPGs? They didn't work on Let's Go, but I'd expect they're helping with Generation 8. That'll mean a total staff of somewhere around ~250 working on generation 8 right now, with development presumably having started a little over two years ago (Let's Go entered development early to mid 2016 judging by comments made when they were revealed).

I don't mind how Let's Go looks too much, but I'd agree completely that more sophisticated textures and animations especially are desirable for the new mainline titles. Let's Go were spin-offs for beginners and Game Freak's first HD Pokemon RPG. Generation 8 should have been the focus for both Game Freak and Creatures Inc (and perhaps with assistance from Nintendo's other studios or from freelance studios), so I'd hope for a more technically proficient experience.

That's part of the reason why it hasn't change. If they can lowball the presentation value and it doesn't impact sales, why they should invest more in it.

Alright after looking at the Let's Go games I see what OP means. I don't think it is nearly as bad as OP makes it out to be, but things clearly need to be upgraded, even if ever so slightly. I'll just point some things out...

The semi-circle parts of the ring don't have enough side segments. In layman's terms this means they look like a stop sign, instead of a circle. The sad part is that this can be fixed by sliding a dial in 3DS Max. It's a two second fix. If you look closely at the boy's sleeve you can see the same sort of issue.

Past the first set of trees, we just have a skybox textured to look like trees. Creating some low poly landscape and then dropping copies of the first two trees onto it wouldn't' take more than 15 minutes. 

The part where Charizard's arm connects to his body needs some cleanup. It looks like they just slapped a smoothing group on a low poly connection and called it a day. You can see the same sort of problem where his neck connects to his head. 

Everything about the mouth and teeth are too low poly. The teeth are just six sided cones. Borderline N64 era stuff there. The corners of the mouth just connect with zero chamfering. Fixing these things would take five or ten minutes in a modeling program. 

The Whiskers need more horizontal segments. This whole model just needs to be redone with 50% more polygons. 

Venusaur's toes look like they are right out of an N64 game. 

At first I thought this was just a thread asking that Gamefreak suddenly get on the level of the Odyssey or Xenoblade staff. But now I have to admit that all these models need fixing and these are things that even I could do in my spare time. And I'm not very good at 3D modeling. 

Edit: And all pokemon eyes should be their own seperate semicircles at this point. There should be a little bit of depth to the eyes. Instead there's usually just eyes that have been textured in. This works fine for smaller creatures like Pikachu, but not for Charizard, or big characters. 

Still being used is fine. Not updated at all is another issue. Nintendo has been known to recycle game assets for years. The Gamecube startup sound for example is just some old SNES song reversed. Or something like that. I forget. I'm pretty sure that Brawl character models were just Melee character models with better textures, and a few tweaks in geometry. 

Honestly Incineroar isnt even that bad. I think people are still salty that the fire starter turned into a standing bipedal yet again, hence the hate.

There are much better examples to show, such as this:

or this:

or this:

What Game Freak needs is to expand a bit. Hire some people who understand 3D programming and character artists if they want to stay in 3D, it will be massively embarrassing for them if the next mainline Pokemon game suffers from the slowdowns, stutters or straight up bad engine building that every single game since the DS has.

Yeah as someone who doesn't play Pokemon and has no stake in the series, Incineroar is a pretty bad design.

I can only echo what a lot of others have already said, something should change going forwards as it is embarrassing for a series as high profile as Pokemon to be so technically subpar. Gamefreak really do seem to be a developer without the will or talent to do the IP justice.

In fact, given how crappy Town looks, I'd say they just seem like a bad developer period.