My dude, I've been asking for that option back since they showed the removal of it in a Wild World gameplay video lol.
We're completely on the same page. I made a big post about it in the pre-Direct thread, but yeah - I feel as though they've spent the past few iterations focusing more and more on the sort of "me, me, me" aspects of Animal Crossing. "Look at my house!", "Look at my town!", "Look at my patterns!" - and the focus on that notion of AC just being a game about hanging out with your interesting and kooky animal neighbours has become less so over each game.
I really hope that while they've spent time developing the sort of "individual experience" of this game even further (crafting, town building, etc.) - they've also gone back to refine that other aspect of it. The animals shouldn't just be a backdrop or a sidenote, they should be just as much the focus as everything else. This being said, pretty much everything I see from AC fans, whether on reddit or elsewhere, is about the former aspect I said above - and not about "look what this animal said to me!". Maybe we're just out of touch when it comes to why people love this franchise lol. So many of the new features New Leaf added, the dream suite, the model home area (or whatever it was called - didn't use it often at all), all of it were sort of focused on that. Even Pocket Camp really reinforces that notion to the nth degree I think - and it's really too bad.
If they want to keep the franchise being called "Animal Crossing", they really gotta step it up in the "Animal" department - because it's slowly getting to the point where they might as well drop that and develop their own take on Stardew Valley, or farming simulator or something. What's the incentive to build a cool town for my Animal neighbours when they're all boring as hell to communicate with?
