@people bitching: Honestly, I'm unsure what the metric is. I agree with
Afti's post, no one argued that those things were good or that we would run them so fucking chill lol.
The idea is basically to identify things in the usage stats that have absolutely no place in the metagame, that is, moves, abilities and possibly Pokemon that have zero competitive use, not even as gimmicks.
Most of what was mentioned are gimmicks, but this definition allows for situational things.
Note that in order for a Pokemon to whole-hog classify as a candle, it must be out-classed in each and every way by another Pokemon. It can't just be "X is a better spinner than Y," it has to be "X runs every move that Y can run, has better typing and better stats all around."
Very few things fit this definition imo, many of the things discussed fit the sentiment of statement A ("X is a better spinner than Y") but not statement B ("X runs every move that Y can run, has better typing and better stats all around").
Effective candles will be things that appear fairly frequently among newer/less competitive users but not at all at the upper echelons.
However, this is the thing that confuses me most. Going from the statements above, statement A applies more often than B. For this reason, I'm not sure what we're trying to determine.