ITT we debate over whether Smogon is good or not without swearing or insulting other people. Let's see how bad /vp/ is at being normal
I'll start.
Smogon is the best place to get 6v6 singles games. While it is notorious for bans, the site limits its bans by making each one have to be a 60% majority vote, and weeds out the less knowledgeable players with a simple reqs system. This means that bans will not be made unless a large majority of the best players can vote, which is a very fair system.

The 'cookie cutter' argument is wrong in 2 ways. For one thing, there are many many team archetypes and while some Pokemon are simply able to fill many roles in many teams, the reality is that there is a huge amount of variety in teams even at the top level. Sure, some Pokemon will be terrible at their roles and can't get into an OU team. That's why there are multiple tiers, so that you CAN play with your favorite Pokemon without it being deadweight. I would argue this is actually better than VGC formats in this regard; that every Pokemon barring Furret, Dustox and Unown has a niche somewhere. Please note I'm not saying it's altogether better than VGC, just that it's better in this regard.