>>16990068The more unknowns there are, and the more choices that could possibly be made/enter into a decision, the more chance there is to fuck up, and the greater the divide becomes between your average/good players and your great/elite players.
That's all well and good for the competitive community, who would like that, but that's not what Pokemon is marketed towards. There's a reason that luckhax are integrated into the game, and legal for Nintendo events while not in outside communities like Smogon.
I partially agree that knowing EVERYTHING at the beginning is bad. But you only know their team, you don't know their movesets, their held items, their EVs/IVs, and so on. I think those things should be revealed at the end of a match though, so players have a better idea of exactly what to expect in the future, and so someone can't win an entire tournament solely on the element of surprise. (Battle Analyzer was a horrible thing the way it worked, but it would be nice if there was something that would work similar to how that did, but only after a match completed, to tell a player exactly what they went up against.)
Besides, if you eliminate Team Preview at tournaments, then you will have groups of players trying to spectate matches/teams of players sharing information about player X with Y team and player A with B team and it becomes one-sided in that only players with a social network get to know what their opponents are using in advance.