Am I misunderstanding? A chess game where each person can power up one piece as they choose is still a completely valid game. Is there anything objectively inferior to this?
Anything can be considered a 'game.' You can stand with a friend, roll dice, and bet on numbers above 3 or below three, mark down the results, agree to a certain number of rounds, then assign the winner to whoever won the most rounds. Here's the difference - that isn't competitive. There's no such thing as the world championship dice rolling contest. Why? It's not something worth investing any time, effort, or energy into because the parameters are outside your control. It's a game of chance.
You can then go to the very opposite of this kind of game. Let's take a 1v1 sport where all the pieces of it are in your hands, something like a fighting video game where each of you play the same character as the other. This enables an equal playing field were moment to moment, each player can impact the game meaningfully at any one point in time. There's very little if no chance involved in the outcome. Some people enjoy this kind of format, but no one enjoys sitting around, rolling dice until an outcome is decided by chance.
Then you go onto more probability focused games. Take poker for example. While chance is no doubt involved in the outcome, it's compelling to watch two players put loads of resources on the line to prove they can play better than the other. They do everything possible to read the other player's intentions, they estimate the various probabilities and chances for certain cards to show, etc. This allows top poker players to consistently perform despite the probability laden game.
Pokemon is closer to poker than it is to a fighting videogame. This is due to the variables involved that are decided by chance. At the same time, having awareness of these variables and how they impact the game state from moment to moment allows top players to perform consistently. Now take dynamaxing into this equation. This introduces a very specific style of play, hyper offense, and grants it an unproportional amount of tools compared to every other playstyle. This creates a centralization, a sort of stagnation of strategies.
This is due to what I'll call an estimated power level. It's simple really; when the top level mons are so unbelievably strong, they destroy 99% of other mons outside of a select few, niche counters. This is due to the raw power they have. This is why dynamax is so centralizing. It makes certain mons so strong, they muscle past even the niche counters assigned to handle them. That in and of itself destabilizes the checks and balances that have been built up in pokemon for years now.
It creates a volatile, unstable metagame that is very dramatic to watch and play. I can't deny that dynamaxing is exciting and fun to watch. This is because anything can happen at any moment. The thing is, that is intensely frustrating for the competitive players who have invested the time and effort to become good players. They can spend tens of hours creating a team and have all that effort washed away by a dynamax at the wrong time. Yes, as a spectator that can be fun to watch.
As a player that actually CARES about the damn game though, it just makes you want to throw your hands in the air and move on to something else.
That's the issue here. Most if not all the arguments for dynamaxing I've heard can be summed up in a sentence or two, "Yeah, it may be a bit uncompetitive, but it's exciting, fast paced, and it's novel. I like that part of it." <--- This isn't coming from competitive players. This is from people who casually play here or there. The thing is, smogon was made with being competitive in mind. They have tournaments and a history of competitive play. Warping the meta to suit the spectator at the expense of the player isn't worth imo.
And the reason for that is simple; this is a platform created FOR competitive players who play the game hours a day. It's fun to watch personalities who play the game, but at the end of the day, smogon was created to give singles a competitive format. Dynamaxing, despite being exciting to watch while being novel, isn't competitive.
If you want to keep playing with dynamax, I'm certain there will be other formats that allow it. For christ sakes, balanced hackmons exists. You can play anything your heart desires there. Anything goes will likely still have dynamaxing. My point is, making the prime, competitive tier bend to something because you think it's cool isn't doing the community any favors.
Thanks if you read through this. It was a doozy.