[Deck Knight]

I'm going to go indy here and answer "none of the above."

Because my answer is that the step this project was screwed up the most at is Concept Assessment itself.

You might ask how it is a non-voting discussion is the lynchpin in all of the competitive woes of the project. Simple: There was never supposed to be a competitive focus at all because the concept was never pared down to something competitive aspects could address.

I'm going to use myself as an example later but lets start with CAP 1 and what reachzero did with Momentum. Momentum was at least as ethereal as Risky Business was from a concept baseline standpoint, but because reach forced us to focus not on moves that maintain momentum like U-turn and Volt Switch but instead focus on moves that can break an opponents momentum of give your team momentum for multiple turns, we had some inkling of the competitive direction we wanted to go in. Prankster buffed a ton of momentum altering non-attacking moves, while Intimidate was a stopgap against the prevalence of physical sweepers.

What I did in Mollux was try and crystallize what would actually qualify as a bad typing before making the slate, and I dragged that concept assessment out for quite a while because typing was the lynchpin of the project. Had I just let people pick whatever and go with say Bug/Dragon, it'd be tough to argue we actually selected a Pokemon with a "bad" typing, even though it'd be weak to Stealth Rock, Ice Beam, Hurricane, and Outrage.

The CAP was doing fairly well through Weak Armor, but since the TL didn't want it even though it was a great ability for the concept, it went down hill from there as no one had a clear indication of direction and ironically all of the abilities that had risk inherent to their usage (Flare Boost, Guts, etc.) were all prohibited.

Ultimately I feel its a matter of a concept that started out vague, got little in the way of direction, and then when it started to take shape was then purposefully muddied into incoherence, and people just bandwagoned the strongest remaining ability posted within five words of some variant of "risk."