I like DQ9 quite a bit and fail to see how Level 5 ruined DQ. If anything, it seems a lot of the ideas that "ruined" DQ9 came from Horii himself, unless I'm mistaken.
And saying DQ9 barely had a plot is silly and plain wrong. It had about the same amount of plot and character development as past games. Almost every DQ is about the adventure and not the characters, and if it's about the characters it's often about the NPC characters through a multitude of quests that you happen along the story.
DQ9's stories were mainly meh. It started strong with the ghost black knight arc which was awesome, but then after that it was mainly forgettable mini-stories that didn't live up to past DQs and the main plot was eh. And no, previous DQs all had memorable characters beside your MC who you'd get to know, DQ9 was basically just ghetto navi who sucked and no one else. DQ6's party members are alright, with a few good ones like Teri but they're still way better than a silent MC + silent party members zzz.
Anyhow I know you loved DQ9 Himuro, so I'm not going to argue with you. You liked the game, I thought it was DQ8 minus the awesome visual experience of real proportioned world exploration, the good cast (yangussss), and a decent story. And I already didn't think DQ8 was anything more than a "good" DQ that paled compared to the earlier trilogy.
At least this won't have the 1st gen N64 graphics of DQ9. 
It'd be nice if DQ10 at least has a 3d wrpg style world like DQ8 to explore around, since the graphics will probably be SD 3d whether it's on Wii or 3DS or PSP or whatever.
