It's kind of sad how anime-Ash never got to have any character development. The anime could potentially have been good. If they want 10 year-olds to relate to the main character, they could've just introduced a new main character in every season who is 10 years old, instead of making ash perpetually young and stupid.
I think it's general consensus among fans that the games are canon, while the anime is basically a commercial.
The Pokémon Adventures manga (aka Pokémon Special) : I think it's pretty good. Not amazing, but a good and interesting manga. The anime could easily have been pretty similar to it.
Anyway, I stopped reading around halfway through the Johto region because the scans were getting unbearable - switching reading directions between left-right and right-left randomly, messed up page order, duplicate pages appearing later on... got completely lost because of this. -_-