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I don't think Gamefreak ever directly worked on a Pokemon home console game until the Switch outside of a few developers or supervising.It's probably because they lived in a handheld bubble up until the Switch. They probably didn't understand why home consoles are so popular because Game Freak and most of TPC never really touched past consoles like the N64, GC, and Wii and didn't really understand what kind of experiences people bought those consoles for (especially the N64 and GC). Even going as far back as the N64 and PS, there's been a strong fascination with open exploration adventure games. You had tons of sandbox platformers like Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, action-adventure games like OoT, exploration heavy RPGs like Final Fantasy VII, but many of the highest selling games on console did and still do put a heavy focus on exploration. There's just an inherent appeal to have a large open space to roam around for hours, days, even weeks. Not to belittle anyone that likes other genres, there are some games that don't fit that pattern that still sell extremely well on consoles, but most frequently the games that do sell on consoles tend to have exploration elements.
And honestly I feel like Nintendo kind of forgot during the Wii and Wii U era as they were chasing casuals, but luckily they remembered with the Switch and that's played a role in why the Wii U failed and the Switch succeeded. The Wii U was especially a sad time for anyone that grew up with the above games or more modern takes on those experiences like Skyrim, all Nintendo really had was BotW, which was delayed into being cross-gen and saw far more success with the Switch than the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles X, a side entry in the XC series which was (and still is to some degree) a niche ARPG (again, no offense to Xenoblade fans, if you love them then great, they just don't sell super well), and a few ports/remakes and third party games. Slim pickings for fans of those types of games, if you were like me and you grew up with games like Mario 64/Sunshine, Banjo-Kazooie, OoT, and Metroid Prime, you probably didn't see much you liked from the Wii U unless you also liked some other genre. Now I think the marketing confusion was probably a larger factor, but beyond that, I think the lack of these types of experiences on the Wii U really hurt it.
Meanwhile they learned their lesson with the Switch. The Switch had a tremendous launch year lineup, but in particular the one-two punch of BotW and Mario Odyssey (and especially BotW, but the two were pretty much 1a and 1b) really jumpstarted the Switch's success. It was really refreshing having games like this be emphasized after quite a long stretch with little that remotely resembled these games.
Anyway back to Pokemon, seeing BotW bring the kind of success that it did is when the lightbulb really seemed to come on for Game Freak and TPC. I think that's when they started to understand why they were wrong about mobile vs. console. You can really kind of see this with the evolution the series took on the Switch. LGPE was still very much mobile inspired and was probably decided on before they saw BotW's success so it was too late to adapt, then SwSh they threw in the Wild Area to provide a limited form of the BotW type of experience, then with the SwSh DLC and LA they started stepping closer and closer to BotW-esque open world, and then with SV they finally went all in.
Yeah, I feel like people saying "they could just announce something in a Summer Presents" is just copium. Most likely if they had a game to announce for the Holiday season, we'd already know about it.
Now I do think maybe there's an outside chance of NSO ports being revealed at the Summer Presents for this year's "game" but that might just be copium too. Every year I keep thinking "this is the time that NSO ports will be announced" and they keep not saying a word about NSO. IDK what the holdup is, but I think at this point it's probably time to stop expecting this and be pleasantly surprised if it actually happens.