[cim]

Unfortunately, things went very far downhill shortly after this. The next year was spent on entirely pointless "tests" because by its very design, so-called "Stage 2" was 100% pointless. Eventually, when Stage 3 rolled around, the results of Stage 2 were irrelevant.

Let's take a step back and think about the previous paragraph. A whole year was wasted by a process that was designed out of the box to be pointless. I want to make sure that is very clearly understood. Stage 2 was pointless. This is so important to understand because it is often bandied about that proper tiering processes take too long. In reality, poor decisions regarding the tiering process is what makes it take too long. Unfortunately, DP was a case of the latter. A sane process would have been similar to stage 3 from the start. Also important is that a sane process would have stopped at the design of the first test, and considered only a simple rating and deviation check.

Words cannot express how glad I am that I am no longer the only person saying this.

We spent an entire year on a pointless part of the test that literally accomplished nothing, and now we claim any testing process is doomed to be long just because an idiotic process was used last time that made battlers do nothing for an entire year. The process can easily be made more efficient, and I hate this whole "testing is inherently slow / flawed / inefficient" argument that keeps going around.

With no efficiency improvements, testing every Suspect with Stage 3 alone exactly as is despite its fatal flaws would have taken 7 months. Cut a few more bits of the process down and speed it up some more and you could easily bring that to 4-6 months.

After Stage 3, things became even worse. After messing up immensely over the last year and a half, the wasted time was used as a reason to introduce an another bad process. First of all, after messing up so badly, there should have been a major leadership change in tiering policy. How does it make any sense that after messing up badly you get a second chance? We have plenty of people far more capable of handling tiering than the people who handled it this generation. We need people with special skills. People who not only enter tournaments, but place well in them. People who engage with strategy and the community in Stark Mountain. People who have contributed to site content more recently than two or three years ago. People who are capable of putting in the technical work required to make processes a reality. It's time for other capable members of the community to set the direction for tiering policy.

I'm going to completely throw myself under the bus and agree with this entire paragraph. I don't feel the leadership in Generation 4 should extend to Generation 5. I think Pokemon battlers that are actually active in tournaments, on the ladder, or in competitive Pokemon in general would be better, but this is yet another reason for such a change.

Thank you Cathy for bringing everything I ever possibly wanted to say to the table in such an eloquent way.