They gave you so many freebies throughout the game, on top of other things that made the game itself excessively easy to play through, even for a Pokemon game.
They gave you a free gen I starter, free Lucario, free Mega Stones (Mega Evolved Pokemon, while conceptually really neat for competitive play [and even then some of the Megas are game breaking in competitive as well] breaks the ingame experience in half) for them, exp all extremely early, etc.
It didn't really bother me to much because even though they gave a gen 1 starter as well as Mega Stone, I just ignored them and played the game as is. It's much more fun that way, and to be fair EXP all made training a lot less tedious (though the memories of tirelessly training your pokemon to be the ideal level would be a missed feeling). Still an easy game, but the fact that you could still play the game in whatever way you wanted made the experience still more fun then people made it out to be.
I mean we can argue about which generation was the best, but in terms of regions I think each one was equally awesome.
Kanto was awesome for being, well, the first region you explored. That makes it special in its own way and I don't think I need to sing its praises.
Johto was awesome because in my opinion it had a somewhat darker and somewhat "older" so to speak than the Kanto region. The eerie atmosphere plus with the new generation of Pokemon made it cool to explore.
Hoenn was awesome because it was the first generation to have more of a diverse landscape despite a healthy amount of it being just water. There were different looking caves as opposed to the brown muddy ones you saw in Gen 1 and Gen 2 and the volcanic area had more detail in landscape than having a few shades of whatever color.
Sinnoh was awesome because that was the generation that Game Freak started to put more detail in the region. In terms of different landscapes and buildings, Gen IV outclassed previous regions substantially. Towns actually looked different (to its credit, Gen III did this to, but I think Gen IV did this better), and different sceneries like the snowy mountain sides to the marsh lands, Sinnoh was a blast to explore and you could get side-tracked a lot. Not only that, but there were a lot of place specific Pokemon (ex. the legendaries like Rotom, the honey trees, the regional stones for Leafeon and Glaceon, and more) making exploration around this scenery even more expansive and enjoyable.
Unova was dope because cities actually looked like cities and there's a ridiculous amount of detail put into routes, ghost houses, cities (and even gyms, since gyms were infamously repetitive in previous generations). The Pokemon league looked awesome, and alternating between inside and outside Victory Road and sliding down whenever you felt like bailing was a nice touch.
Kalos was also cool not because it necessarily had scenery that previous generations lacked, but because it took the best parts of every region and mashed them into one in 3D. This was probably why people didn't feel it was as special since it didn't have anything new per se, but being able to explore new areas in such a different art style made exploring different caves and areas much more different than every other generation and I loved that.
