I'm disappointed that many of the Pokemon that would thrive under the stat system of Legends: Arceus are not in the game. Due to how damage is calculated, attack stats barely matter, which means Pokemon like Serperior with high speed and defenses but meh or outright bad offenses are absurdly powerful under the Legends forumla.
While there is stuff like that like Uxie, Pachirisu, and Lopunny there are far more glass cannon Pokemon in the game, and having good offenses barely effects how much damage you do and bad defenses just means you get one-shot since stuff will very often survive no matter how high your attack is.
Honestly can use this logic for Mystery Dungeon given how speed was completely refactored
The talk of GF never thinking of meta balance makes the whole "early route mons are perpetually weak 90% of the time" honestly hurt more. It shows they can "nerf" a mon, but ultimately do it for traditional spite, regardless of the starter literally being a better mon
Granted, Guts Swellow, Staraptor, and Scolipede are great. But that's the exception, not norm
I honestly think the balancing issues really set in place in Gen 4 due to
-Hyper distributions of good moves (Why does Infernape get Grass knot!?)
-Not fully compensating the special/physical split (We still have no physical variant of hidden power)
-Stealth Rock being massive for damage if your typing sucked
-Lots more setup moves, or better distribution of setup moves (Nasty Plot)
-Minmaxing (Granted, certain Gen 1 mons had it and lasted as a result)
-Way more weaker Legendaries or event mons
Actually, for Gen 3 OU (since that's before 4), let's look at the viable mons
For the 27 OU (well, 28 given Chansey is still good) staples + 77 other viable UUBL mons, we have 104 (or 105) to choose from
Of the 27:
Gen 1 - 12 (13)
Gen 2 - 7
Gen 3 - 8
Of the 104 (105);
Gen 1 - 42 (43)
Gen 2 - 28
Gen 3 - 34
It seems mostly balanced, Gen 1 having more due to having more pokemon than others...but! This is current OUs! Well after influence from later Gens, which GF won't have for ref of Gen 4s dev. As such, this data is biased! If anyone has 2004 OU data, please add!
Gen 4 I recall being more aggressive, let's just look at OU staples only (again biased via later gen influence)
Of the 49;
Gen 1 - 11 (12 Chansey)
Gen 2 - 10
Gen 3 - 7
Gen 4 - 21
Yeesh, Gen 3 mons took a hit. It's clear a lot were built on pre split. There's almost twice as many OU 4 mons than 1s! I blame Rotom forms partially too
There's probably other factors, but it gets more how noticeably abrupt this is