VOTING STARTS NOW!!!!!!!!
BTW I thought I should say this, this thread is very disappointing to me, not because of the effort you've put in or the quality of the thread itself, but because I honestly feel bad about how someone tried to start something up to try engage the community and it has mostly been ignored asides from a few people.
This sort of thing has annoyed me since I've stopped being a complete noob and started gaining enough perspective to know better.
I kind of came in with this silly ideal that we would all help each other to become better, almost be like a bit of a team or a family but the reality can't be further than the truth. The reality is the only time I am going to ever play or interact with the majority of the community is in a tournament. I used to ask around practically every day for friendlies and the like, feedback on teams etc. so I can actually improve in an environment where I not only get feedback from myself but others if I'd need it about my team or gameplay (this you CANNOT do on ladder or Cart) even to the point of personally PMing various people and perhaps over the last 11 months I've played 6-7 people from the battlespot room/discord outside of tournament or by chance meeting them on ladder and only one of any frequency (Monsareeasy). The Japanese are probably far ahead of the English speaking community because they actually theorycraft, talk and train together. I see more talk about how to play the game in my ladder games in the 1500s by Japanese ghosters than I do from the actual community.
I don't know if I would have ever kept playing BSS for more than a few weeks without going through Battling 101.
How do you expect the Battlespot scene to grow without actually putting any effort towards it? I get that it is easier though to just sit in the bubble and once in a blue moon come out to criticise someone else for saying something wrong, most likely more to make yourself look right and smart than to actually help the person in question. Lets just wait for Gen 8/Lets Go and pray new players join the community seems to be the stratagem of choice. If I was looking at this from the outside in, I'd be bailing.
The forums dead. The tournaments aren't cared about. There's no talking about the game. There's basically no way to actually get better other than almost completely on your own. At least some people stream BSS gameplay, but that's about all I got to say.
There are some nice people here, but man don't expect anything but decline in BSS, at least on Smogon.