People have been waiting five years for this. It's reached half-life 3 levels of memeness because of how much people kept expecting it with every announcement.
And here I was thinking it was wishful thinking: The first two games needed remakes because they couldn't be traded from to later games. Ruby and Sapphire don't have that distinction. I'm pretty sure I've got some pokes from my RSE games on my XY cart right now.
Whatchoo talkin' bout?
The Sevii Islands and Emerald Safari covered Johto
'mons, HGSS was just trend-keeping. Besides, you need two kinds of handhelds and five games to get Hoenn pokes now.
People couldn't get Ho-Oh and Lugia without playing the Colosseum games or scoring an event item, and the Runner Trio was only
technically available via FRLG. (Even if you bought both games, you had to restart one after beating the
whole thing and then do it all again to get all three.) And then of course there was the Red Gyarados, the Extremespeed Dratini from Crystal, and so on. Plus, there's just the whole "Hey, this is the team I used to beat Red" aspect that you just don't get from the Emerald Safari Zone.
(And even that only makes up for so much. I had
so many shinies due to stupidly good luck on my Gold cart that died the inevitable cold hard death of battery failure because I couldn't transfer... Then it took
years for me to encounter any in the later gens. And the first of
those was a Hariyama who first-turn Whirlwinded. And the
second was a Safari Zone Oddish who ate
six safari balls and still managed to escape. I was cursing GameFreak for
years over the no-transfer thing because of that.)