>>22975846In almost every story (and every story if we're just talking about hero's journey) the bad guy will fail in the end. However if your goal is to make the main villain look competent, you need to keep interactions between them and the heroes to a minimum, otherwise they just look like bumbling idiots unable to beat some upstart kid/teenager.
Biff/Cassidy don't really fall into this because they were clearly treated as joke villains too (assumedly they actually succeed at a few missions in between fighting Ash and co. though, thus more competent than TRio).
Lysandre, on the other hand, will probably be a "competent" villain. We know he'll probably lose in the end, the point is that he's winning the majority of the time though, and we can take him seriously.
