1.) Rain is the best weather in our metagame currently, what makes it so strong in comparison to the other weathers?
while rain was always the best weather since gen 5, it's pretty telling that the moment gen 6 came around with weather abilities having a limited number of turns to work with, almost every weather playstyle disappeared for a while. up until that point, weather abusers could be played in far more ways than simple bulky offense, allowing for stall and balance to shine, but by having a limited number of turns to work with, the only feasible playstyles require players to build under the assumption that you have to do something big for every turn given to you. to this end, the only weather one can feasibly build a team around is rain, not solely because its the only one with a fantastic setter (though it definitely helps), but because
rain is the only weather that can take full offensive advantage of the few turns it allows.
even before taking into account how varied its teambuilding options are, rain has so many viable advantages going for it on a pure mechanical level. it boosts water-type moves, it lets anyone with swift swim outspeed almost the entire metagame, it turns hurricane and thunder from powerful but inconsistent to immediately spammable, it can boost the bulk of grass, steel and bug types by weakening fire type attacks... all of these things are advantages that can be immediately taken advantage of, and being able to not just boost water, but also give advantages to so many other types, allows for so many options that balancing out rain teams is pretty simple.
then you get to any other weather, and... there isn't much.
3.) Competitively, what do you think is the best and worst weather, outside of Rain, and why?
(for the sake of having this post pace correctly, i saved question 2 for last)
sand's technically the best of the three, but its main thing doesn't really promote abusers, so much as it just promotes the setter to have a bit more bulk and/or give some extra chip damage, with its one good abuser, excadrill, mostly existing because it's already a good pokemon without the speed boost (and even then, it doesn't like losing mold breaker). pokemon like mega-garchomp having sand force sounds neat in theory, but the fact that it only really boosts the same three types that sand's always benefited means even that's as limited as ever. ultimately, even it's the strongest outside of rain, i'd say that sand has the least potential simply because it limits itself too hard.
hail's problem is mostly that modern day "hail teams" aren't really hail teams, so much as they are aurora veil teams. aurora veil is a pretty solid move, but teams built around it don't really pass as any sort of traditional hail team. as a nice side effect of this, however, hail arguably has the most potential, as a true hail abuser that can also make good use of aurora veil can offset the typing weaknesses that older hail abusers had by having so much overall bulk.
sun boosts fire type attacks... and then it lets pokemon that are weak to fire type attacks have more speed. so whereas rain complements many different typings that can be helped by it, sun complements exactly one other typing, and that typing is immensely weak to the one thing sun boosts. it doesn't exactly take too long to figure out why sun's the worst kind of weather to to teambuild, to say the least, but thankfully it's an issue that isn't too hard for CAP24 to potentially fix.
4.) Are there any underutilised weather mechanics worth noting in this process? Do you think they're exploitable?
something i'd want to emphasize hard here is the importance of
manually setting weather. one problem we're going to run into is the same problem with every other partner-focused CAP, because once you get down to it there's realistically one good setter for each weather type, and we don't know if those setters will be good enough in the future. allowing wiggle room for manual weather to shine helps ease it away from that, so it can still function on its own.
beyond this, though, there's not much that wasn't already discussed, so i'll try to poke at any that hasn't been talked about.
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sand veil and snow cloak are a hard pass, since making those abilities viable would most likely result in a pokemon with massively compromised competitive integrity
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ice body heals in very small amounts, which was fine when weather lasted forever but is terrible when you only get, at most, half your health back, after over eight turns
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solar power could be nifty, but it pushes us even further down the glass cannon problem that sun already has
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growth has only ever really been used as a sun-required nasty plot at best, but the fact that you're getting a swords dance
and a nasty plot all in one turn hasn't really been explored fully, and has the potential for some nifty mixed sets
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slush rush, chlorophyll and sand rush would definitely be great, but IMO they shouldn't be allowed if only because there's nothing to learn from them. weather is good when it makes slow, bulky pokemon into fast bulky pokemon, there's nothing here that would truly educate us in any meaningful way
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flower gift is an absolutely golden ability that's been hidden off from its true potential due to it being attached to a trash pokemon, and it fits that potential bulky offensive that you want in a weather abuser. it also has the nice feature of being the exact opposite of the usual speed-boosting suspects, since rather than making a bulky, powerful pokemon fast, we could use the ability to instead add that power and defensive bulk and have the pokemon naturally have some other strength on top of that
2.) Can you think of any examples of abstract abuse of weathers?
this is a super vague question so it could mean a whole bunch of things, but i'm going to go with the idea that this is referring to
"weather abusers" that don't take advantage of the weather itself, but still have great chemistry with weather teams. if you ever look at BW teams nowadays, a generation where all speed-boosting weather abilities are limited by ruleset, you'll catch a lot of pokemon that function a lot like this, with teams like
this very recent sun team only having two abusers, and instead is built around the last three slots (dugtrio, forretress and dragonite) covering any problems those two abusers might run into.
another example of this in the current generation is hawlucha; the only reason hawlucha would ever exist on rain is because tapu koko's electric-terrain boosted, 100% accurate thunder is something that's very much appreciated on rain teams, and by holding an electric seed with unburden, it gets a defense and speed raise all at once. it never abuses rain directly, no, but it's so immensely good at snowballing and sweeping opponents that it lets you focus more on using your other rain abusers for pure wallbreaking potential, and you probably already want tapu koko on your rain team, so why not?
to me, this is a really good concept to float around when building CAP24. a lot of these weather options have the severe flaw that you might not be able to make full weather teams with just one new pokemon on its own (especially if we're limited to building around one or two viable setters), but if we could manage to have it fit into so many strong cores that other pokemon will naturally be able to fit into these other weather playstyles, then we could very easily make a pokemon that can hold these weather types on its back.
