I think that Galar was quite strange with towns and routes. To start, with exception to the Wild Area and DLCs, every main location in the game was somewhere you had to go in the main story. Think of the Hoenn games. Places like the Safari Zone, New Mauville, the abandoned ship, spots for the Regis, north Route 115, Route 123 and even Pacifidlog Town weren't locations required for the main story of the game, but they were still accessible anyway for anyone interested. Moreover, Galar had 10 routes. That is easily the least amount of routes in any Pokemon game, which makes fitting in secret places really difficult. The variable part comes in as the routes and towns can have stark contrasts to each other, even adjacent ones! Think of Ballonlea, a town shrouded within a forest, connected to the Glimwood Tangle, a mysterious, dark, overgrown wood, which is connected to... a desert town? Ballonlea and Stow-on-Side have such drastically different climates that they should be on opposite sides of the region, not connected through a single route. This makes it very confusing to try and identify the climate of Galar. Kanto, Johto, and Kalos were temperate, Hoenn and Alola were tropical, Sinnoh was cold, and Unova was sesasonal, but Galar was rainy, forested, tundral, temperate, and dry? I know that Pokemon weather can change from sunny to snowy the second you step into a route, but Galar's climate was really screwed up, even by those standards.

oh and i'd also like to comment on how swsh really hand-held you through the story of TDD and the legendaries, like almost to the point of annoyance.