Yeah I like most of what you posted, except where you go into specifics, I obviously think you are wrong about DT for instance. This isnt the place to argue that anyway..
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Stability isn't something we can get I think, since the game has a lot of options and players will constantly discover them, which is why it's better to rotate Pokemon out back and forth (ie, rather banning Garchomp, feature it in some special league once a year or something), because what is broken now (due to the game not being completely discovered) may not be broken later, while what isn't broken now may be broken later, etc, which is the biggest reason why people consider the suspect tests inflexible. Smogon would be much better off if they stopped calling the Suspect test a test but just making it a feature -- rotate the metagames through SPL or something like that (ie, season 1 of SPL can be "featuring Latias", etc, something you feel like testing).
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I think here you are making a big assumption. Stability isnt something we can guarantee, but at least to some extent I think it is something we can expect. I mean the top 10 OU pokemon have mostly remained in or around the top 10 in OU for ages. It's generally only with new releases that things really get shaken up.
Even if there was no stability, I dont see why we would rotate. I mean, if it's already unstable why bother?
There is value in some degree of stability. Of course we cant guarantee it, but it is nice for people to be able to come back from a hiatus and not be completely lost. And obviously there is some extreme where people are constantly having to build new teams to keep up, and that isnt desirable. But also stagnation is a bad thing as well. There is a (subjective) ideal level here. This would also be difficult to vote on however, since the voters almost by definition will not currently be on hiatus.
I'm also very skeptical of the people who say that there is too much variety in DP. While at the same time other people are saying they want to unban Garchomp because they are sick of seeing the same pokemon all the time. I mean, obviously the more you battle the more variety you are going to want in the game.
The one thing I would say about variety in dp is that teambuilding is much harder than it was in advance. Essentially in advance, after a year or so I just built teams by numbers. I had a formula I'd follow, and I could deviate from it and know the effects of deviating pretty easily. I mean, when it comes down to it, there arent really very many options in advance. It's easy to glorify it in hindsight, but by the end of it we were all sick of seeing the same old shit.
In DP I have nothing like that. My team building is a much more evolutionary process, with constant tweaking and often several versions of the same team. This can be frustrating, it means that a lot of my battles will tend to lack variation because I am too lazy to make changes. But that's me, not DP.. Hmm.. This is a sidetrack as well.. The point is I dont like the too much variety is a bad thing argument.
I'm thinking about the complaint a lot of people have with DP, which is that once a battle starts there is very little thinking to be done. And it just seems to me that there just isnt any rule change that would fix that..
I mean, to reward thoughtfulness at a teambuilding stage, you just need a lot of viable options available, so people have room to innovate. Though, it is hard to know what is a viable option until people have innovated them.
But to reward thoughtfulness at a battling stage there is no obvious method. I mean, the only thing I can really think of is to ensure that battles are long. But I mean all you really do there is give a player more chances to think during the battle, but make it less valuable each time they do.
Out of interest, for those of you who play both dp ubers and dp ou, do you find that one or the other is worse for this? Is it really variety that is the problem here?
Which makes me wonder, if, having a battle where you have a lot of opportunity for thought but a low chance of that thought having an impact is a problem or rather is the problem people have with dp. Because that is a very serious problem. But not having to think in battle may not necessarily be because of too much variation it might just be because of a bad metagame. In fact I can think of situations where a metagame with very little variety would result in this so I am not convinced that the two issues are necessarily linked. It may be more to do with the offensive nature of the dp metagame than its varied nature. I mean there is probably some correlation there just not necessarily as much as has been made out.
What I am kinda getting the feeling here, is we should just start off with some rules, however we get to them, and then just not change them, unless we really feel like something is broken.
So like, in DP we would have started as we did, gotten sick of Garchomp and banned it. And that would have been all. Until Shaymin in Pt I guess..
Wow this post is a mess. I was just going to write a couple of lines and now its like 2:30am. I kept going back and thinking of new things and adding them in, so I apologise if it doesnt quite make perfect sense structurally.
Have a nice day.