Yeah Joe's reaction to all this has been very interesting. He was really disappointed on the day of the announcement from what I remember off Twitter, but seems to have made his peace with it. And that's fine, because that's probably where a lot of people are in the fanbase - they're really disappointed but they'll still get the game and try and enjoy it for what it will be. Joe's tone on this is probably also different because of his position in the community, and I totally get that too.
I just wish he wasn't so dismissive of perfectly reasonable problems people have with this game - apart from the pokedex and mega evolution cuts, people have also criticized the graphical quality (which I don't have much problems with, but I get why others do), have called Gamefreak lazy because all the old models were already made and future proofed in Gen 6 (
and Joe agreed with this initially btw). I don't agree with all these criticisms (my problem is only really the Pokemon cuts and to a slightly smaller degree, Mega Evolutions, the latter of which could easily be remedied by the potential depth we have seen with Dynamax) but I think they're mostly fair. It's fair game to compare Sw/Sh with other games on the Switch, because they use the same hardware. Many people were also really expecting a generational leap but this ended up being an iteration on Gen 7, and I think this is a reasonable disappointment as well, even though being a long term fan I just couldn't see that ever happening.
I just wish Joe wasn't so dismissive of many accurate and reasonable arguments people have made in criticism of these games. He has a respected voice in the community (maybe the only one left given the Poketuber debacles over the last couple of years) and is probably trying his best to keep both sides of this divided fanbase happy. I know there's been a lot of misinformation and exaggeration out there, but that will always exist in this age of hype cycles and staggered info dumps, where companies only share information with us in small, calculated doses. When they give us incomplete information, there will be speculation. It's pretty understandable. They should have given us the exact number of Pokemon that will be in the Galar Dex when announcing the Culling IMO, would have saved a lot of speculation and given some much needed clarity to the situation. Instead they've given us a "non-response" response and essentially told fans like me to bugger off.