They are going to drag along the gen4 content for as long as they can (specially with the vast amount of legendaries in that gen). Most player are already prepared to evolve their old mons into the new gen4 so if they released it quickly people would bore and leave until gen 5 hype or CD. It's just the free to play model, releasing content (and shinies specially) with a dropper to keep people hooked every month
This event was very underwhelming
Let me prove it by showing you the pros and cons:
Pros:
Double Candy!
A cool looking dex filler
A Machamp Waller
Literally nothing else
Cons:
Trading was not integrated in any way
People waiting for mass transfers wishes were not fulfilled
The main legendary is garbage, thanks to Shadow Sneak being worse than Psycho Boost, and getting a Latios esque moveset
The other two Pokemon introduced are nothing special
The event seems to be centering around the Research Task and the "exciting raid = more cash" instead of actual gameplay
Drifblim does not have Flying type moves, allowing people to still spam Machamp
Misdreavus, Weavile, Honchcrow, and Dusklops evolutions not introduced
Answers
I personally think this events fantastic. not every event needs to be mega-meta relevant and with the upcoming evolutuons for sneasel and murkrow (which even if they were out now wouldn't hold a candle to the dragons v giratina) allows us to stock up on tons of candy (and in the case of sneasel) the research encounters let us build up large numbers of good iv versions of them without needing to use raid passes to reliably get them
Plus theres easy rarecandy research, evolve 3 shuppet/duskull, and all the shiny possible pokemon. plus the boxes are good.
Dont disagree it was underwhelming, but it could have been a lot worse.
To be honest, Niantic might not have intended for people to use hundreds of storage space to hoard mons for transferring during double candy, that's something the community came up with by themselves. What's missing is them acknowledging this whole situation. If they don't want people to do this, not saying anything and then not giving the expected 2x transfer bonus during Halloween is indeed a kick in the nuts. They could have written another developer's insights article about it and stated that they will not do 2x transfer candy anymore.
I agree with most of the points, but there 2 other things I like:
- We can get Sneasel from the "Catch 5 Houndour or Poochyena" quest. This quest is common and relatively easily doable. This is probably the first time we can get Sneasel from quests and it has an evolution that might be useful.
- 1 Rare candy from a relatively common "Evolve 3 Shuppet od Duskull" quest.