I'm going to just leave this post here...
First off, I'd like to clarify that I'm a UU person. I've only played UU consistently, and it's the only tier I really understand to such a depth where I don't have to see something and worry about what it's going to do. When I first got into the community, I at first thought Ubers but realized it wasn't much fun working with the stuff I'd obsessed over for multiple years of in game play and would rather try out the lesser-quality stuff. I became aware of the fact that OU was the main game and the most popular and whatnot, so I naturally went to one worse than that because I'm a happy non-conformist and not conforming is what I do best. I spent a while getting decent (as in, I sucked but not so much anymore), and now consider myself to be a not horrible player. I'm not a super successful laddererererer (#37 is my peak), but I can manage to win more than half my battles and know that when I lost, the loss was to someone who is either more intelligent than me or spends more time at the game than me. With that said, I'll go into the stuff that is actually relevant to this whole debate.
First off, weather is not as easy as those who are fighting it want to make it sound. I've imported some successful teams and tried to use them in OU, and using weather properly is not as simple as clicking
. Weather wars are tough, and I'd find myself valuing winning the weather war so much further ahead of everything else that I would lose 5-0 a lot, with the only dead mon on the other side being their weather inducer and my last mon standing being a TTar/Politoed/whatever. Which of course is really bad. But the point here is- it's not an instant win button. You've got to worry about other weather and make sure you're valuing everything properly- weather introduces a whole extra aspect to care and worry about, and there's nothing wrong with a more complex game. It makes being good at it more difficult and require more time and dedication, something we want as a community.
And then you can say something like, "Well, that only means weather is difficult when you're facing other weather." Which would be correct, at least as far as my point goes. As soon as you're
not facing another weather team, that extra dimension of a weather war that makes the game more complex, fun, and tricky to understand goes away. Instead, you've replaced a competitive, fun aspect with an advantage that you automatically get just because your team matches up against theirs preferably. The first team I had was some variant of hyper offense and sun, and I found myself ALWAYS winning against weatherless teams. It's hard to beat a team that has a Quiver Dance Volcarona, Growth Venusaur, a Ninetales, an SD Sawsbuck, and a Scizor for fallback priority. You kill one thing, and there's a second, more powerful sweeper in its native environment of strong sunlight waiting to punch you in the face.
Note- unless you have weather of your own. Then, my team is just a bit... terrible... and dies as soon as Ninetales does. I mean, it's an awful team, and if a competent player uses it, they should feel awful. But something like that is REALLY hard to beat when you don't have weather or three phasers (Skarmory, Heatran, and Kyruem-B... amidoinitrite). Which is a bit silly. Beating weather shouldn't require weather, or else it removes the variety that we aim to achieve.
I'm not really sure where that puts me, but I don't feel like my opinion is all too important because I am nowhere near as active in OU as most people here. And while I've just provided an argument as to why weather isn't a good thing, I think I'd vote for it to stay. It's fun and unique to the tier of OU (Hail in UU does not count, it is neither good nor fun to play with or against), and for all the complaints that exist, I think a skilled player will not be affected by weather as much as most people like to think they are. I haven't liked weather in my visits to the tier of OU, but it's because I don't know what to do with it and it's scary. I'm not sure who said it or where it was in this thread, but I'm going to paraphrase something along the lines of, "I'm pretty sure you have your facts wrong. Go check the top of the ladder, I'm sure that most of the teams up there are weatherless." I'm not absolutely certain how true or not this is, but from my knowledge and observation, it seemingly is. It's a very good point.