>>31497767This.
Gamefreak owns the rights to all the Pokémon used in teams in the vcg and in smogon tiers; you'd think it would be simple, feasible, and well within their right to make a game with gym leaders based rain-dance teams, setup teams, baton-pass teams, etc. copied from viable teams assembled by fans and IRL champions.
I hesitate to teach kids how to hold their own in the meta-game, but goddam I would have loved some better in-game examples of these proven strategies in action as a kid. Since the internet was a mere prelude in the early gens of what it is now, I spent up to Gen IV thinking that raising/lowering a star by one stage meant altering it by one POINT (as in, slash goes from 70 to 71 with howl, 72 with swords dance, etc.) thanks to some dumbass editor at Nintendo Power giving a piss-poor explanation of how stats worked. I'd always get rid of stat moves by the time my team was level 20, because at that point the difference in attack seemed like it would be negligible, and no npc's had the programming to demonstrate an attack's power with and without stat boosts (and if any of them did, I probably OHKO'd them before they had a chance to using retard-strength over-leveling and type advantages like every other kid playing these games).