Weren’t some of their alternative protags popular? Maybe they finally feel confident that they can start cycling between the player stand-in characters each game, now that they can reliably have someone cool instead of, I dunno, this doofus.

For most of its existence the Pokemon anime was trash-tier. Even the early seasons that I’m nostalgic for just don’t hold up even compared to other shows at the time.

…but for like the past five (maybe ten?) years the quality of the anime has really gone up, and I think the current crop of show runners finally have enough clout within the Pokemon Company to make the big change that the older execs were almost certainly afraid of.

I’d say something along the lines of a show aimed at a pretty young audience has more of a need to change to remain relevant because you don’t really “age out” of watching the Simpsons the way you do with Pokemon. They need to keep bringing in new people to replace the ones that grow out of it.

Still doesn’t really explain why they waited so long. Maybe just a case of no one wanting to be responsible for tanking a franchise with a bad decision.

The game version of Ash pretty much.