I'm upset about Pokemon games on the 3DS family...

The lag was unbearable but I'm pretty sure there's a way to run the game at n3ds speeds :-/

The only lag in sun and moon I noticed was during 2v2s, but I didn't get incredibly far in that so I could be wrong.

I'm upset about Pokémon in general. I've not cared too much for anything since the original Silver and Black/White. Instead of giving me all these extra online layers and a billion fucking ways to infinitely battle NPC trainers in weird places (like a subway) and constantly putting a new spin on the formula, how about meaningful QOL improvements? It took eight games to get rid of HM slaves, I mean fuck...

the N3ds only has a faster CPU, the GPU is the same weak little thing as in the old 3ds. And I really don't think Pokemon is a CPU bound game, but a GPU bound one.
The Pokemon models are already next (console) gen, because obviously they don't want to remodel the Pokemon for every gen(they redid the sprites before the 6th gen every generation, but sprites are much easier too make), so the 3ds can barely handle them in all their glory with shadows, animations and what not.
If you look closely at the Pokemon Let's go trailers you'll see that even the attack animations are the same as in X/Y/ORAS/SuMo

Honestly X/Y/OR/AS didn't run too horribly on the old3DS, but they did have some barely noticeable frame drops. Running them in High Memory Mode would have benefited them, but not really made too big a difference for most people
S/M/US/UM should not have been on the old3DS. They ran like shit on the old3DS and US/UM ran even worse on the old3DS. Those should have been exclusive to the new3DS.

I kind of agree. USUM/SM could have been better, but a lot of shit happens after 20 years. The worst of it: trying to pander to an audience that has no idea what the fuck they want.

When we were the target audience, the world was different; we got what they gave us and the worst that could happen, was a 12-year-old writing a letter that got thrown out by some dude-bro or paying enough money to Electronic Gaming Monthly for a positive review.

Now, every asshat can rip the work apart and demand more Pokemon Amie and photo sessions instead of better gameplay, more customization (for battles), harder difficulty, etc,.

Maybe Let's Go Pokemon! (only for N3DS)--a (probably/35% chance) low-ish-resolution chib-make of Pokemon Let's go Eevee+Pikachu, or a third entry (PLG__) featuring a new (Gen 8) mythical boxface will come out for N3DS, months after Switch gets Gen 8.

But, they'll totally use the "no outline" code.

I don't think it's unbearable, but it is definitely noticeable. I'm glad they came out on o3DS because I can't (or couldn't, rather) afford to buy a new DS every year or two for a new Pokémon game. That'd be worse than dealing with poor performance, imo. However, I do agree there should have been some n3DS exclusive performance improvement. Under-utilizing that hardware when over-utilizing the o3DS hardware is just silly. Similarly to how some games had DSi exclusive features and ran faster, this probably could have and should have been done. Even some 3DS games do this already, I think(?).