Yeah I agree, the only one of these gimmicks that has been somewhat good is mega evolutions and they are still not great from a balance standpoint. Other than that I struggle to see how fundamentally different modern Pokémon games are from the old ones. There’s a lot of QoL stuff, but most of it is easily ignorable imo.

I think that you might want to look at rom-hacks like someone else suggested. You’ll probably find what you’re looking for in one of the hundreds that have been made.