Hoenn is my favorite region. Emerald is my nostalgia game. What you say is fair and valid. Early game movesets don't feel good at all. If it's within your means, I would suggest trying Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire. It feels much better to play through. If you never want to see Hoenn again, then no shame in that. :)

I'm on a slow run through all the games. SoulSilver definitely is hitting

In that gen at least you kind of have to grind out some XP before each gym or you get schwacked. Whether that makes it a better or worse game is subjective. In the Alpha/Omega remakes this isn't much of a problem. But when I tried playing through those I stopped because it was trivially easy for that reason and others. Again, subjective.

I think the difficulty curve of Johto in G/S is quite relaxed until you get to do the rest of the gyms. Maybe that's why emerald feels like such a slog.

I hate to tell you that you gave up too early but most of the good things about emerald happen after the 5th gym when you get surf (the expanded story from ruby and sapphire, the battle frontier, improved gym leader teams and rematches, etc)

Gen 3 has so many trainers so you shouldn’t be underleveled with probably the only exception being the 5th gym. The only trainers between the 4th gym and the 5th are 5 or so in the desert and the gym trainers. The gym leader also uses 3 fully evolved pokemon. If you don’t have a strong super effective move (which is likely) then that fight will be a challenge.

The rest of the game I don’t think is that hard, the 7th gym is probably the next difficulty spike but I won’t tell you.

Some pokemon are also just not good and so you probably shouldn’t bother using them. It’s not like in later games where even if a pokemon is weak you can use the power of friendship and drugs to power boost it until it can fight anyway.

This is the last Pokémon game I played and it’s my favorite. I used to get Rayquaza early game and just blast through. There’s a lot of cool stuff after the final gym.

To be fair, anything that follows Gold/Silver is going to feel lackluster. Because Gold and Silver are awesome (personal favorites).

Joke aside, it probably just isn't for you. Personally I can't bear gen 4,5 and 8 but love gen 3,6 and 7

I skipped the 3rd gen GBA games and jumped from Soul Silver to Omega Ruby (I played Platinum ages ago) and I agree with you, perhaps is it too much water?

Okay bad joke aside, I maaaybe don't love the 3DS graphics, when I eventually get to play Pokemon X and Moon I'll find out I guess.