>>20236959The people who complain about Smogon rarely actually play any kind of competitive metagame.
People with only play with friends, that sort of group, assuming they even play at all.
Pokemon Online has their own metgame, and despite independently coming up with their own tier and ban system, largely falls in line with what Smogon has done with a few differences. This is likely your best bet for a non-Smogon metagame that has more than 5 players.
VGC/Wifi battling basically has no bans outside legendaries and is either viewed as terrible for the unbalanced state of the game, or as great for its laissez-faire attitude towards battling, at which point there are no complaints.
Those who do rant and hate on Smogon AND play on Smogon servers generally are low/mid ladder players who don't understand that high level play is different than the level they play at, and want to changed the metagame based on their mid/low level understanding of costs benefit analyses and what they view as 'broken.'
Finally, there are those who play on Smogon and understand the need for a guided metagame who will come to a disagreement with some of the decisions that Smogon has made. Some of this group tend to hold biases against few influential members of the Smogon community (sometimes justified, sometimes not); this branch tends to be the most unlikely to change their mind when approached with logic and examples of how X actually does deserve a ban or how Y doesn't. The rest just come to the conclusion based on their experience of low/mid/high level play based on their teams.
If you're a mid-high, or high level player, you can easily make the benchmarks needed to vote. Despite the rare systematic overrides, Smogon's bans have largely been done by a majority vote.
