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Fun fact: I broke down all the games that I thought had the lowest starting variety over the first 3 gyms once and found out that BW1 had HALF the selection of the other games I measured it against (BASE Diamond and Pearl and Gold and Silver).
And that's counting non-options like the elemental monkeys in the total tally.
And I decided to just go ahead and chart out the selection past Castelia just to see how it goes and if you were expecting the variety to balloon out at some point you were mistaken, it very gradually expands over the game with an inordinate amount of Pokemon being introduced in the very late 6-8 gym range which is not normal for Pokemon games.
Between this, and some of Unova's Pokemon being VERY mechanically terrible, and the high evolution levels making others unviable in the main game, I think there's a real case to be made that BW1 has the worst variety problems in the series by a strong objective metric.