>>26599298Palpitoad REKT Elesa's Zebstrika and Burgundy's Stoutland. Then it jobbed to Roxie's Garbodor and tied with Stephan's Zebstrika at the league.
I think with the Unova team they thought that they'd give Ash a stronger mon for every cutesy jokemon they'd give him. The cute ones got all the screen time, personality and joke/shitmon scenes while the 'strong' ones were battle machines but got the better battles and were shown to be more competent fighters.
Grass: Snivy (cute) - Leavanny (strong)
Water: Oshawott (cute) - Palptoad (strong)
Dark: Scraggy (cute) - Krookodile (strong)
And then you had Pignite, Unfezant and Boldore who all evolved under Ash and were treated more like mons from Ash's other teams like from Hoenn.
Unfezant didn't really get to do that much as Team Rocket weren't doing their usual Meowth Balloon shenanigans and became even more irrelevant after Charizard returned. Pignite was shown to be a competent battler but again was nothing compared to Charizard.
Also probably the only reason why Roxie vs. Ash was 3 vs. 6 was to at least give some of the more neglected mons another gym battle even though half of them (Palpitoad, Unfezant, Boldore) jobbed and only Pignite, Leavanny and Pikachu got to actually do some damage.
