think the thing i liked about the original companions was that they were just co-protags, even if most of Misty's initial pokemon never saw use (Horsea/Goldeen arguably gets it the worst) or Brock's Onix, they had goals. later on since Advance they always had to stick a girl protagonist to represent the latest set of games, then reverted back to the two-gym leader system in BW presumably because the BW protags are older in-universe in the games themselves, this time round in XY they just shoehorn in Serena into a backstory involving Ash just to canonize her as being roughly the same age rather than being older. At least they had the decency of spreading traits around to make them likable overall now instead of having a all-expert conspiracy nut sommelier and a wild child gym leader (is that even canon since Roxie?) that had two lots of Togekiss* to make her team better, now you just have 2 sides of Brock moved to the co-protags and bought back a Max-alike child sans intelligence.
Like the Adult/Wizened, team mom and womanizer aspects of Brock was moved to Clemont, Serena and (to a lesser extent) Bonnie respectively which meant that Bonnie's role as the child is believable and is overall less grating in comparison to Max. but this came at a price of having Serena's Pokemon not really using moves for 20 episodes and always has a one-sided crush on Ash; Japan tends to use this goat near the winter months-February that and X/Y had nothing like contests to break monotony, so she just makes rivals just from cooking contests and Pokevision until they started to do random contests...but not quite contests every so often. and Clemont isn't really doing much neither, no Pokemon evolved and he had to have a backstory to push in a Luxray/Luxio.
Rotating co-protagonists would be nice, or even flesh out the characters so that they're similar to their game counterparts but something to make them different. you'd think maybe Clemont would trust the group enough to leave Bonnie with them and some other character comes in, then swaps back out. also Team Rocket needs a better dynamic with their Pokemon, guess they made a start by avoiding hurting/overly hugging/harming pokemon like Victreebel/Cacnea/Seviper/Chimecho. Inkay/Gourgeist seems pretty neutral so far, could realistically see Wobbufett being back due to fan popularity. Chimecho tries to fill too many niches (affectionate, the Wobbuffett motto filler, kind of similar to Mime Jr).
* By "a Togekiss", i mean characters gaining powerful and/or area-inconclusive Pokemon for the sake of adding diversity or to just make characters more interesting. like James finding a Carnivine in one of his many mansions or a Yamask near a museum, or Dawn getting a Togekiss from an identically -looking princess, Jessie's Pumpkaboo (latter case), Iris is an extreme case since she had a Excadrill all that time before she revealed that she had one and that she managed to catch a Charizard-like Dragonite. also, James' Victreebel, anyone?
