>>35119687>but wasn't STAB usually safe unless a Pokemon couldn't use it (Kingler) or coverage moves were consistently more useful?Yes, but the norm was Pokemon either had STAB access, or high stats with coverage, but NOT both. Take Gyarados, who learned NO Flying moves in Gen 1, and whose best stat was Attack while Water was a special type. This prevented Gyarados from overkilling. Dragonite was similar, learning NO Dragon or Flying moves and making up for it with high attack and coverage. Gengar, with its high Special Attack, learned no Ghost or Poison STAB attacking moves and even if it did, both were physical types. And probably the most surreal of all: right out of Pallet Town, the wild Pokemon have a huge advantage over you through access to STABs. Rattata had Stab Tackle and Quick Attack, Pidgey had Scratch and Gust (since it was Normal/Physical). Your starter had no STABS at this point, so this was balanced out ONLY by the low stats of those Pokemon.
The Gen II Special stat split, but not a Physical/Special category split, happened because GF wasn't willing to give up the idea of Normal (or Neutral) moves as a balancing crutch which they designed all of Gen I around. The result was Normal type became even more centralizing, and with limited access to STABs stall became the dominant approach to battling.
So why complain about increasing offense? Because by Gen IV, GF already had nearly 400 Pokemon balanced around the old mechanics, and the Gen IV Pokemon didn't take this into account either. This is the equivalent to Synchro Summoning appearing in Yu-Gi-Oh, and breaking older cards that were created in a time period where summoning fast, powerful armies of monsters was hard/impossible.
This is why the split broke the game: if introduced earlier, the BST, stat distributions and movesets might have been more fair to the newer Pokemon, and Gen I didn't need major restats because they already had access to tons of coverage (see: why Clefable).
