It's not entirely fair to call the Animal Crossing brand tremendously weak just based on Amiibo Festival's performance. The strength of the brand starts to become irrelevant when the gameplay and the general concept is as uninspired as that game sounds. If you look at the Animal Crossing spin-off which sounds like it actually has somewhat enjoyable gameplay, Happy Home Designer, it sold over three million copies worldwide. The last reported number on the Animal Crossing amiibo cards was also over 20 million back in February. At the very least, I think the Animal Crossing brand is strong in Japan.
I've been trying to avoid looking at the Sun and Moon leaks so I wasn't aware of this rumoured Alola Form of Dragonite, but I'm really interested to see what it looks like now. I'm hoping it's not just mostly a colour change, because they could do some really cool, different things with Dragonite in terms of changing the design a bit.