I have two quotes for this thread:
"Yeah, well, he's gotta have a name, don't he?" -Rubeus Hagrid
"You're gonna be sorry if you don't give it a name." -Walter Chang
In case you hadn't yet guessed, I'm all for decent nicknames, love picking my own, but prefer others' honest attempts at decent nicknames over the species name. Primarily because...seriously *points back up at the quotes above* It feels rude to the poor little pixels otherwise. The default is their species name. "Hey, Human! I'd like to introduce you to my new girlfriend, Human."
"Nice to meet you, Human! Human's talked a lot about you! Even his mother, Human knows how sweet you are!"
Having said that, I have been known to go on name hunts for certain species of pokemon, often learning quite a bit I never would have researched otherwise. One name hunt recently led to a Slavic myth about a woman named Vlasta that was pretty cool.
I often give them geek-inspired names like something based off the latin names in their species, or fandoms of the various games/fiction/movies/etc that I enjoy.
Some are more creative, some not so much. I will admit I've been known to search for about an hour for the perfect name.
Then there are puns that occur to me that I simply can't resist, such as naming my female Skiddo in a luxury ball "Beatrix" (for all you Kill Bill fans out there). There wasn't enough room for Beatrix Skiddo xD
I don't really care if I'm going to breed a better version myself, but if I can't breed it, I really really want to give it a name.
I've received both an IV'd Pichu named Pickles and a Skiddo named Mr.Fabulous both of which I kept out of pure respect for the randomness of their names.
In general I like to nickname my pokemon, otherwise it's kind of like naming your dog "dog".
Pretty much my whole point. Just wanted to add, I do appreciate when people get clever with that concept though. I use to have some friends who named their Dog "Deogee" (Dee-oh-gee though that's probably over-explaining something obvious). On that note, I recently nicknamed a water pokemon who refused to yield a good name "Aychtuo" (H2O...again, probably over-explaining).