Oh, this thread is amazing. I have to say.
Anyway, I basically knew nothing about Physical or Special moves and how they corresponded to stats...or natures, or status moves, or basically anything vital to competitive play. The first time I played FireRed was hilarious looking back on it. My Blastoise was basically 40 levels higher than everything else I had on my team, and it had a moveset something like Surf/Skull Bash/Hyper Beam/Bite. Then I had a Jolteon with Double Kick/Pin Missile/Thunder/Quick Attack. I basically caught whatever the crap looked cool, so I ended up with about 3 Water-types, Pidgeotto (It never actually evolved since I basically spammed Blastoise and Jolteon all the time), Jolteon, and a random Weezing with Self-Destruct...and I actually used the move consistently. Why, I'm not sure.
Platinum wasn't much better. I had a Machamp with DynamicPunch/Strength/Fire Blast/Hyper Beam. I didn't realize that it had No Guard, so because of it I basically taught DynamicPunch to everything that could learn it because I thought it was the most amazing move ever. Needless to say that when I went on Serebii I was rather disappointed to find that its accuracy was 50. Unlike a lot of people, I never really taught HMs to my main Pokes (Except Wailord which had like Surf/Waterfall/Dive/Ice Beam) and was furious when my brother taught my Palkia Rock Smash and Cut. I would usually catch a Bidoof or some random crap and teach it all the HMs.
I also came up with what I thought were genius strategies and wrote an entire Word document with what I thought were the best strategies for Pokemon. Unfortunately, that was on my old Netbook which is now fried, otherwise I would copy and paste that entire document in. I basically got coverage moves for EVERYTHING, ideally moves that would hit stuff that the Pokemon was weak to (Hence my Empoleon with Earthquake and Electric-resist berry). I had some ridiculous stuff like Dusknoir with Shadow Ball/Dark Pulse/Psychic and Aggron with basically all Special moves. Needless to say I was incredibly confused when everything in the Battle Frontier outsped my Pokemon. It's so hilarious now that I think back on it...but they were the good ol' days.