Excellent.
It seems Sugimori confirms what I had hoped for and suspected with X and Y. They are finally cleaning house and streamlining the games.
To prevent misunderstandings further down the thread, let me make something clear:
The interview is comprised of quotes from sugimori; just the interviewer's interpretation of their conversation, so it's bound to not be completely accurate.
Second, when sugimori talks about "simplicity" he is not referring to making a grass type dog that looks like a green dog. In design, simplicity is not the laziest way to do things, it's the smartest way to do things. Pokemon red was simple. For its time, it was perfectly executed; you had a wide variety of creatures, the vast majority catchable and usable, tons of moves, which fulfilled specific functions depending on the pokemon that could learn them, never overlapping movepools. later, more things were built on top of that base: more moves, more pokemon, more mechanics, etc. But many of those things were just experiments GF conducted in their games that didn't had the result they hoped for, or were just plain stupid.
See how since the second gen, we've had pokemon carry items, but the national park's safari game didn't carry on; or how berry planting in 3d gen became just harvesting in 4th gen and a portable grower in heartgold/soulsilver, and in 6th gen they finally got it right by just giving you an orchard to grow an assload of berries. Or how contests became different contests, then pokethlon, then musicals, then movies.
Now the franchise is sitting on a pile of crap leftover from the previous games, and everything is a mess. I don't think they will remove pokemon, nor moves (at most they will tweak a lot of them to make them more unique) but a lot of mechanics could be streamlined and combined; they got a lot of things right in XY: the berry farm, megaevolution, the super training, pokemon amie, I don't think they'll get rid of them (and they SHOULDN'T) since they are new additions and they are legitimately good: berries were always scarce in the games, making using them either worthless or a limited resource, mega evos put some pokemon on par with legendaries in the metagame (although they made a mistake in making them widely available in the games so soon: Megaevolution should have happened the first time you face the champion. That's how you build up a feature and keep gameplay balance, GF!), EVs were always a pain in the ass, but somewhat necessary, now they are less of a pain, and could be even entertaining; and pokemon amie is just the bestest thing ever in any pokemon game, period. they could, for example, remove IVs and increase the maximum amount of EVs possible, effectively making pokemon more powerful yet unique (the more EVs there are, the more varied the stat spread could be and more possible to balance pokemon), they could, also, completely revise every movepool (ampharos can't learn dazzling gleam and tail glow, let that sink in for a minute). First gen pokemon could learn post-first gen moves that fit them and don't learn moves that don't by common level up at reasonable levels instead of the current mess that their movepools are, and that also goes with the other gens.
They have a lot to fix. graphically they are done; XY was all about beauty, both the good and the bad: the games are gorgeous, but also incredibly shallow. Now, gameplay is next, and hopefully, story. hopefully the 7th gen will have the 3d cel-shaded goodness of XY with the streamlined, simple gameplay of 1st gen, plus the good additions the previous years brought with them. And, with any luck, a equal or better story than BW.
