Would you have liked to see a Pokemon Z?

The thing is though, I’m not sure I’d describe any of the new generation pairs as “incomplete,” except for maybe SM.

Red & Green are fine; they’re a total package (albeit buggy, but so are all the other Gen 1 games), and nothing that was added by Blue or Yellow was anything they couldn’t have lived without.

Crystal, again, adds nothing that GS desperately needed. I doubt they’d planned to add the Battle Tower or those extra Unown puzzles in GS but had to cut them because they ran out of time. Instead, I would think that those things, along with aspects like the visual touch-ups and animated sprites, are ideas that they thought up after the fact as a way of making the new game more distinct and worth purchasing. When it comes to video games, just because a game is complete doesn’t mean it can’t still have bonuses added to it later on. Like... I can make a sandwich with just meat and cheese on it, and I can call that sufficient. But that doesn’t stop me from adding lettuce, tomatoes, other condiments, etc., and conversely, the fact that I can still add those things doesn’t necessarily mean that I was in a hurry to make the basic sandwich, either.

It’s the same deal with Emerald - RS already featured a Battle Tower, and I think it’s obvious that the Battle Frontier is just something they cooked up as a novel incentive for people to double-dip on the Hoenn games. Same for the Gym Leader rematches - they do expand on the PokéNav feature, but I doubt that the PokéNav as it appeared in RS wasn’t already what they set out to make it since that’s the only aspect that changes. And the new story elements like the Magma Hideout and the Space Center takeover are just there to pad out the merged storyline - but then, I would say that’s not really how the story was intended to be told, compared to the RS version, which is a lot more organic and streamlined, and plays more directly into the duality themes that Hoenn is supposed to present. Particularly with that aspect in mind, I’d find it hard to believe that Ruby & Sapphire aren’t pretty much what Masuda envisioned them to be. Like, it’s pretty clear that Team Magma and Team Aqua were meant to be version-exclusive teams who create a proper climax involving either Groudon or Kyogre, and that Steven was meant to be the Champion, no matter how many people like to describe Emerald as the “definitive” version of the story. I think it would be strange for RS to be considered “incomplete” but to also contain the more intentional story experience.

Platinum, I guess, is a somewhat more interesting case because the new content is mostly fixes to various problems in DP. DP aren’t really incomplete - they have a pretty healthy main storyline and post-game, and offer a decent amount of things to do on the side (the kind of stuff that, if absent, would get games these days accused of being “rushed”), but they were very flawed in terms of their technical capabilities and the presentation of certain things (like the new cross-gen evolutions, or Amity Square).

B2W2 is kind of an interesting example as well. Because we know for a fact that one of the major features - the Key System - was intended for BW, but wasn’t worked out in time. So in that instance, what you say about time constraints does apply. But does the lack of that Key System really make BW an incomplete package? I am admittedly biased toward liking BW, but I think even an objective measurement of everything BW have to offer wouldn’t strongly sustain an appraisal of them as “incomplete.” And if anything, Game Freak were able to do more with said Key System by holding off on its implementation, because in B2W2 it can also be used for the Memory Link and the Dream Radar. So there’s a bit of an irony, in that BW lacking a certain intended feature didn’t make them feel “incomplete,” and yet if they had included that feature, it wouldn’t have been as well-rounded as it was in the games that did include it. That all gets at something I should point out, which is that of course all of the new generation games probably have some cut features. But I imagine that some of the third versions and remakes do as well. That’s just the nature of video game production, and isn’t necessarily a fault. But features that get cut are usually ones that are considered less essential to the current project - something it can survive without. That such omissions exist - like, if I set out from the beginning to make that sandwich with meat, cheese, and lettuce, only to find that I’m out of lettuce and don’t have time to run to the grocery store - doesn’t make the game incomplete or unfinished.

Maybe that seems like pedantry or splitting hairs, but “incomplete” just strikes me as a bit of a misnomer, I guess, when it’s really the third versions that exist as frivolous and mostly unnecessary upgrades that can be whipped up in short order to rake in some extra profit while GF work on developing the next big project.