Nintendo always moves slowly (except for wacky-ass hardware ideas). It's a bit painful at times, but the alternative is that they crash and burn explosively.

Pokemon not making the jump to a real time open world is disappointing. But I suspect they'll do it for the next generation. Now that the consumer is finally feeling burnt out on when they're offering.

They probably didn't think they could get open world right this go around.

My one big hangup is that they're so reluctant to develop a proper, system agnostic platform for their retro content. If they weren't the sworn enemy of emulator developers, I could see them in-housing a few to jumpstart the retro platform. But they won't. Though Disney got it's ass into gear about opening up the vault, so maybe Nintendo will too.