>>40597578I never really used it back in the day, mainly because of much of a pain in the ass it was to breed competitive pokemon. Using your regular team with EV's earned through the story just got you curb stomped in the upper levels, and the lack of physical/special split didn't help.
Around gen 3, a lot of us didn't know about EV's and IV's and even if we did, it took so long to build a decent pokemon, and a lot of it was blind, using online calculators to figure stuff out. We couldn't just go to an NPC and have a 6 pointed chart of our IV's with the colors telling you their nature, and an additional color for EV's. Then EV training had a ton of pen and paper tally-marks. It was a nightmare, so we just never did it. Because of this, making our way through the battle tower was kind of a slog, and there was no sense of trying to improve our Pokemon. It just wasn't worth the headache.
Now though, it's so fucking easy to breed and train a competitive ready pokemon. You can just choose what pokemon you want, and within a night you can have it competitive ready and you can verify using in game charts.
If there was anytime for a competitively-focused post game battle section, it'd be now. It'd be so much more accessible now than it ever was before.
But of course as the competitive battle became more accessible, for some reason Battle Tower type stuff was phased out. It makes no sense. Real misstep on Gamefreak's part
