I liked the idea of the floating initiative thing, but it didn’t work very well.

It was very inconsistent and basically would have required a comprehensive overhaul to interact with every move correctly, but they just kind of did a vague "priority and status moves are cheap, everything else has the same a normal flat cost" thing. It also boosted the power of what was already one of the strongest attributes - speed - while all the other stats were nerfed across the board with the flatter, less-stat-intensive damage formula, breaking their "actually almost balanced overall" core system.

I actually kind of liked whatever fuckery they did to the damage scaling though, it was the first pokemon game in a decade where I lost battles occasionally.

My biggest problem with it was that it was counterintuitive and RNG heavy, further compounded by the fact that almost all the fights in the game were just wild battles. Like I saw some wild first stage bird that was ten levels lower than a third stage with good stats take off 60% of its health with a non-crit, non-supereffective, average powered move - that's obviating stats and leveling to a comical degree.

As far as difficulty, Sword and Shield actually had decently tough post-game stuff, which emphasized that trainer battles in the games being horribly undertuned is an active design decision and not the devs being unaware of how to create challenging content. I've played fan games and romhacks that fixed the difficulty in a natural feeling way without shifting the damage way too far towards the move's raw numbers and away from the attack and defense stats.

That's another "I really hope Palworld has forced them to rethink some design decisions" area, because at this point there are literally two entire generations of pokemon fans who grew up with it and are adults now: their audience is people experienced with the games, and I really really hope that Palworld eating their lunch drives that point home.