To be honest, I love most of the Pokemon seasons. I haven't seen really much of the Generation V anime yet, but it looks interesting from what I've seen.
Yeah, TV in general has been declining quite a lot in quality, in particular the arc-based shows. Often to increase the length of the story arcs and such they make tons of filler, or do classic anime thing by switching between a ton of fights, each time rewinding to slightly before it cut off, and it all just hurts the shows quality. Shows which are more episodic don't tend to decline as much, as they don't have any need for stretching out scenes. Personally I've found myself turning to quite a lot of cartoon comedy lately such as Spliced. Unfortunately most of these shows end up getting cancelled and running repeats for ages, i don't know why, probably cause they put too much effort into it instead of doing cheap, easily replicated, shoddy quality shows that can have "new" episodes churned out easier. On second thoughts, i guess its more because episodic shows don't often have a great deal of episodes that they avoid droping, they're sorta like Portal in a way. The quality they produce is brilliant, and though it dosen't last long, it also prevents it from wearing out its welcome...the only problem is that when it's over you have to find a new one until new stuff starts up. As to shows which I've seen that have this happen, other than the ones already posted here i would have to say quite a lot of anime (In personal opinion the only ones that didn't were Soul Eater and Fairy Tail, though i haven't gotten past episode 50 in Fairy Tail yet). In particular (and i know some people are going to hate me for saying this) Bleach, When it isn't dragging out a fight, it's having both of the guys fighting it out taking five minutes to make a single overblown attack, or them talking about how powerful they are. It really seemed to lose a sense of balance in the characters, as lets face it, when a characters reached a point where nobody can beat them, there's really nowhere a series can go other than: A) Restart the series with a different character, or B) make some arc where they fight themselves. This was to me why it was kinda refreshing to see Celestia beaten in a Canterlot Wedding. Though she is definitely quite a powerful alicorn (A whole lot more powerful than Ichigo if we look at how much force is required to move the sun for a second, let alone a whole day), she was still beaten, and in turn Chrysalis was beaten by Shining and Cadence together. Anyway, I've kinda gotten way off track here, just wanted to say that i agree with a lot of whats been said here, and instead i end up writing this wall of text. Thanks for bearing with my ranty-thing Everypony.
Let me explain this to you. G5 looks like crap (there's a garbage pokemon...), they keep replacing the voice actor, and Ash defies time. Ash, in one of the G3 or G4 episodes, had a birthday, in which he turned 11. At the first episode of pokemon. G5, the narrarator announces him as 10 years old. Mind = Raped
You could also argue that his Pikachu should be stronger than anything else in existance. And he should be able to beat the pokemon league by now. But then the series would end. Or they'd get a new character and it would suck beyond what's possible (like yugioh, and how it's not about Yugi). But all shows either stop completely or go downhill. It's inevitable.
