>>55585751Base stats, base points, and effort points weren't commonly understood because Game Freak never gave much transparency into how they worked. Hell, the increase/decrease of natures was never clearly communicated until HG/SS when the stats screen showed the effects using red and blue text.
The understanding of these mechanics came from fans doing their own digging, and so fans invented their own terminology where Game Freak failed to do so (shiny only became an official term starting with Gen V).
Individual values and effort values are intuitive enough, especially since there's always an NPC that judges if your Pokémon has put in maximum effort.
IVs and EVs became prevalent enough terms that they got printed in official Nintendo magazines around gen V, and Pokémon Go players who've never touched main series know about IVs when appraising their Pokémon.
Pokémon Go doesn't display a Pokémon's level, and players judge everything by IVs rather than "combat power" (CP) due to how unreliable it is as a metric of a Pokémon's strength. Shit's fucked.
