>>51339575Because pretty much all the friendly rivals suffer from being incredibly poor goals, the closest are Barry(doesn't have enough bite), Cheren(whose kinda just boring) and Brendan/May(who suffers from a great case of fucking off midgame).
But if you actually look at these characters, they still are kinda "mean" to the player. In a sense Blue was a part of this group of "friendly" rivals as he also gives advice.
Reoccurring idiots like Serena/Calem or Wally aren't very interesting obstacles, you really don't care when they show up again. At best they're NPCs with very focused on stories but that doesn't really make me want to fight them, it just makes me want them to fuck off.
While thats somewhat related to Pokemons writing just being ass so any sort of extended character arc will just be painful rather than interesting, generally the truely friendly archetypes flat out just don't fit as reoccurring fights
