Well, the way I see it, there is a simple solution to the "IV problem", but it would ruin Hidden Power: Make all Pokémon born of "flawless" parents be flawless themselves. That way, you'd only have to breed for IVs every once in a while, and chain breeding would be the new way of spreading the joy to new species of Pokémon. It would also make flawless 'mons flood the GTS, as people would still obtain spitbacks with undesirable natures (but those would still just be perfect for breeding purposes - you'd need an "ancestor" for every Egg group anyway). Given the continued existence of Everstones, breeding competitively relevant Pokémon would be ridiculously easy to do, as you wouldn't have to worry about anything but passing on moves and Abilities.
I do agree, the changes implemented in Gen. VI helped immensely - earlier, flawless 'mons were almost a prerequisite to win, yet they were nearly impossible to acquire without hacking and practically reverse-engineering the game code. Now at least penta- and hexaflawless 'mons are within reach for ordinary people. Still, while doable, the whole ordeal isn't very fun. The way the current system works, well, if you want a competitively decent 'mon, you have to figure out a bunch of stuff (easy enough), then commit a bunch of time and effort to do it (easy once you've got the knowledge - but grindy and boring as heck). That would be okay, if the mechanic of breeding was something more than just "Acquire egg, then run in circles for a while so you can check if the newborn is worth keeping or not". It's very time-consuming, and whether you succeed or not boils down to dumb luck. What Gen. VI did was giving you a way to massively increase the odds of success, but it's still more of a hassle than a test of skill. The actual skill part - learning how to breed, so to say - is the fun and "interactive" part of it. Actually obtaining a good-IV'd Pokémon is just a boring chore. Pick up egg, bike around a bit, check it when it hatches, keep/toss depending on whether you like the result, repeat until you do. Where's the skill and the fun? That's an one-time thing, the first time you learn how to do it, and maybe some when you figure out the breeding chain you have to go through. The entire rest of the process is generating steps and checking results.
Getting good IVs isn't hard. It's tedious. A test of patience, rather than a test of skill. Yet why do we do it? Because it's pretty much required in order to get your Pokémon as good as it can be, and as good as it needs to be for competitive battles. If GameFreak wants to insist on sticking to the "every Pokémon is different" thing, well, IVs will remain as a roadblock to many. I've never delved any deep into it, simply because I won't bother to invest the time to play dice with the RNG. I know my Pokémon will be suboptimal, and I guess I would have lost many battles due to the fact (if I had ever played a competitive battle, that is), but going further into it is too much of a hassle, Destiny Knot be damned.
Just about any improvement GameFreak could implement would be a welcome lowering of the bar for people to get into cartridge competitive battling. My solution above would keep the element of "breeding for perfection", but you'd only have to do it once or twice per Egg group, drastically increasing your reward for managing to learn it (not to mention it'd help a lot of people by spitback spreading over the GTS). An "Eggnalyzer" or whatever to check IVs before hatching eggs would be another improvement - it'd take the most grindy bit out of the IV breeding.
Having IVs count only up to a certain level - say, 50 - would keep every Pokémon unique in training, then they'd all converge in usefulness as they levelled up. Or temporarily alter participant Pokémon's IVs in tournaments, or... heck, I don't know. Just about anything would help the honestly pretty crappy state of Pokémon genetics as of today. At the moment, good IVs don't give an advantage - rather, non-perfect ones give you a disadvantage, and acquiring perfect IVs is frustrating, tedious, slow, random and awfully grindy.
Worst thing is, this shouldn't even be an unpopular opinion. Guess I could say something about GameFreak setting up a bad system and only caring to fix it halfway when it became apparent that "hacking" was pretty much mandatory for people to unlock the full potential of the games - ignoring that the prime motivation for people to exploit hacks was because not doing it yielded a massive disadvantage in the tournament play environment GameFreak themselves endorse, support and even host.
EDIT TO MAKE THIS UNPOPULAR: Yes, I do reserve the right to call RNG manipulation "hack exploiting" even though no external tools were in use, because it required somebody to at some point reverse engineer a significant part of the game's code, then for people to do stuff like changing the game's clock, counting frames, and a bunch of other stuff that clearly was never meant to be part of the game experience when the games were designed.
I do agree, the changes implemented in Gen. VI helped immensely - earlier, flawless 'mons were almost a prerequisite to win, yet they were nearly impossible to acquire without hacking and practically reverse-engineering the game code. Now at least penta- and hexaflawless 'mons are within reach for ordinary people. Still, while doable, the whole ordeal isn't very fun. The way the current system works, well, if you want a competitively decent 'mon, you have to figure out a bunch of stuff (easy enough), then commit a bunch of time and effort to do it (easy once you've got the knowledge - but grindy and boring as heck). That would be okay, if the mechanic of breeding was something more than just "Acquire egg, then run in circles for a while so you can check if the newborn is worth keeping or not". It's very time-consuming, and whether you succeed or not boils down to dumb luck. What Gen. VI did was giving you a way to massively increase the odds of success, but it's still more of a hassle than a test of skill. The actual skill part - learning how to breed, so to say - is the fun and "interactive" part of it. Actually obtaining a good-IV'd Pokémon is just a boring chore. Pick up egg, bike around a bit, check it when it hatches, keep/toss depending on whether you like the result, repeat until you do. Where's the skill and the fun? That's an one-time thing, the first time you learn how to do it, and maybe some when you figure out the breeding chain you have to go through. The entire rest of the process is generating steps and checking results.
Getting good IVs isn't hard. It's tedious. A test of patience, rather than a test of skill. Yet why do we do it? Because it's pretty much required in order to get your Pokémon as good as it can be, and as good as it needs to be for competitive battles. If GameFreak wants to insist on sticking to the "every Pokémon is different" thing, well, IVs will remain as a roadblock to many. I've never delved any deep into it, simply because I won't bother to invest the time to play dice with the RNG. I know my Pokémon will be suboptimal, and I guess I would have lost many battles due to the fact (if I had ever played a competitive battle, that is), but going further into it is too much of a hassle, Destiny Knot be damned.
Just about any improvement GameFreak could implement would be a welcome lowering of the bar for people to get into cartridge competitive battling. My solution above would keep the element of "breeding for perfection", but you'd only have to do it once or twice per Egg group, drastically increasing your reward for managing to learn it (not to mention it'd help a lot of people by spitback spreading over the GTS). An "Eggnalyzer" or whatever to check IVs before hatching eggs would be another improvement - it'd take the most grindy bit out of the IV breeding.
Having IVs count only up to a certain level - say, 50 - would keep every Pokémon unique in training, then they'd all converge in usefulness as they levelled up. Or temporarily alter participant Pokémon's IVs in tournaments, or... heck, I don't know. Just about anything would help the honestly pretty crappy state of Pokémon genetics as of today. At the moment, good IVs don't give an advantage - rather, non-perfect ones give you a disadvantage, and acquiring perfect IVs is frustrating, tedious, slow, random and awfully grindy.
Worst thing is, this shouldn't even be an unpopular opinion. Guess I could say something about GameFreak setting up a bad system and only caring to fix it halfway when it became apparent that "hacking" was pretty much mandatory for people to unlock the full potential of the games - ignoring that the prime motivation for people to exploit hacks was because not doing it yielded a massive disadvantage in the tournament play environment GameFreak themselves endorse, support and even host.
EDIT TO MAKE THIS UNPOPULAR: Yes, I do reserve the right to call RNG manipulation "hack exploiting" even though no external tools were in use, because it required somebody to at some point reverse engineer a significant part of the game's code, then for people to do stuff like changing the game's clock, counting frames, and a bunch of other stuff that clearly was never meant to be part of the game experience when the games were designed.
