Post your idle thoughts and speculation as to how things work here.

Human on human violence is incredibly rare in the pokemon girl. Its a deep seated social and psychological thing, to the extent where not only do hardened criminals hardly ever resort to personally hurting someone, the though wouldn't even occur to them. It'd be like a new york mugger engaging in cannibalism.

The starters available to you in games aren't the starters everyone gets to choose from, they're just the ones available when YOU choose. Either thanks to connections or luck you get some particularly good choices on the day you go in for your first pokemon.

Levels are an abstraction. They're only there to mark the growth of your pokemon and the comparative challenge that your opponents pose. Now this may seem obvious, but there is a few ramifications.

Things like evolutionary breakpoints by level and moves learned reflect how long it takes YOU, the player character, to get your pokemon to that stage. Most people aren't as good as you and some, in their niches, are better. That is why you run across youngsters and grunts with over leveled mons that haven't evolved; it'll take longer for them to get there because they're simply not as proficient trainers as you are.

This is also why you get things like Lance having underevolved Dragonites with illegal move sets. He's a dragon master, he's able to get more out of dragons than you are. When you run into things like this its not the computer cheating, its a trainer who has an edge on you in this respective field.