I am not a good painter from any perspective you want to look at me, and I don't have any sort of design experience you can think of.

At school it wasn't a rare event that a drawing of mine would get a huge penmade black cross on top of it from the teacher.
But while reading your post, and the advices from awesome designers like Mr. Mercier, I couldn't stop thinking about all the hours I spent playing Pokémon in my childhood.
And I couldn't stop comparing in my head characters like this:
or this:

Glorious Pokémons from the first generation, with their smoking beauty and charisma...
To the new ABSOLUTE "GARBAGE" LIKE THIS ONE:

like this guy here:
or the ice cream:

or the drunktard dragon:

I mean WTF just happened in fifteen years?
What happened to humanity?
Where's the "little spark" in those characters?
Why the designers (and Nintendo) didn't consider the fact that we, first adopter fans, would have eventually grown up a little bit? lol