Clearly people havent played gen 4 if they think that is how it works. Its not.
Late Dppt was the essence of balance imo (with Latias, post Latias stupid shit like Shaymin was bs to face). All play styles were viable. No bs megas, no bs no skill gothitelle and everything could be checked and countered.
If a pokemon wasnt ou because it had a SR weak? It sucked anyway, was outclassed, offered little utility etc looking at you Charizard fanboys. Zapdos, Gyarados, Ninjask, Togekiss, Dragonite, Weavile etc were ALL OU and all were horrendously Stealth Rock weak. Infact Salamence and Shaymin-S were BANNED in gen 4 for for being OP and both were SR weak. So i dont get how that correlates with keeping other "dominant" types in check. :\
Plus Payback sp.def Forretress was a thing and at worse 3hko'd the best spinblockers in the game aka Rotom-A and ohko'd Gengar so they couldnt stop you spinning forever. Life Orb Recover Starmie was also a thing and couldnt be spinblocked.
Lets fast forwards to today, you have even MORE powerful spinners and Defog, offensive AND defensive magic bounce users etc. Maybe you're just being outplayed? Just something to think about.
This is mostly true, but if we're going to go on about the Latias metagame, all I'll say is that I think it was very good, but its main pitfall was a lack of diversity. Latias centralized things a lot, and because it was so easy to build around for any style, from full stall to hyper offense, it was pretty ubiquitous. A lot of builds were pretty much exactly the same. That was why I disliked the Latias metagame, though I do wonder in retrospect if people were just bad at "innovating," especially given how exploitable Latias itself is/was and how predictable Heatran/W/G cores were.
Of course, this is no different than a lot of balance now. There's a whole lot of "let's get a few strong attackers and throw Rotom-W and Landorus-T on as the glue!" balance going around, and while those teams tend to get demolished by Clefable (just kill the Heatran that they always run), it's still stale. I think a lot of what is frustrating about ORAS for me is that there are a lot of really good glue Pokemon that are so splashable that teams just end up looking the team. Think about it: offensive has Latios and Keldeo (not to mention Scarf Landorus-T) who are everywhere. Balance has those Pokemon as well as MG Clefable, Mega Venusaur, Mega Altaria (hnnng), Mega Slowbro, Ferrothorn, Heatran, and especially Rotom-W. Stall has Unaware Clefable and Mega Sableye which really help that style out, especially Sableye of course. It's not so much that these Pokemon are OP (they're obviously not) but that, when building, the answer to "why not use Keldeo?" is often difficult to answer. People were talking about a lack of creativity earlier, and I think this is why. I don't think it's inherent laziness but instead the presence of some really solid glue Pokemon.
(Thinking back to, say, generation 4 for example, I think this wasn't true as much. Latias was the big dog, and Rotom-A was up there too, but I think that meta was more about how there just weren't as many good options as there are now. There are more Pokemon, after all.)
Anyway, there are plenty of things I think would be interesting to suspect test. That doesn't mean I would want them actually suspected or banned, but I think they have unique impacts on the meta that should be examined more closely. In no particular order...
- Scald: burn is too crippling, and it doesn't even need good abusers to suck to face. I don't see why this should exist. (And to answer the inevitable "what about Lava Plume/Discharge?" critique, Scald has way wider distribution and far fewer immunities. I'm not sure I really like those moves either though?)
- Knock Off: This move is crazy good lol. Not sure it's broken really, but it punishes you for running a Dark weak/physically frail Mega and is generally a high return move that requires little skill to screw people over with.
- Stealth Rock: Maybe even including other hazards. First of all, it's about as objectively broken as anything in Pokemon, as you are putting yourself at a disadvantage not using it. I think the "it checks broken things" is a terrible argument. All that said, it requires more skill than it used to to get and keep your rocks up. Still, I'm curious what percentage of damage done in an average OU match (weighted for skill) is done by SR/hazards.
- Mega Metagross: Insanely broken.
- U-turn and Volt Switch: Are we sure these moves aren't broken, or are healthy for the metagame? Take Scarf Landorus-T, for example. Are we sure this would be anywhere near as good as it is without "free momentum"? Is Intimidate the only reason it's seen so much more than, say, Excadrill? If I were allowed to impose one "off the wall" suspect test on Smogon, it wouldn't be SR, but rather these moves. The momentum is ridiculous on top of the chip damage. (The latter point is important: Baton Pass is not unmanageable at all from a momentum standpoint.)
- "Luck": Obviously annoying. I kind of with there was a mechanism where things like Flamethrower burns were removed, and every match, each player got one "BS burn/para" and maybe one crit. Could introduce a strategic element. That's pretty out there though lol. (I like it more as a thought experiment than as an actual reality, but yolo.)
- Gothitelle: Incredibly obnoxious.
- Elf Stall: Uses Delphox and Nidoqueen, rly d00d???
If I were to pinpoint actual problems, uhhh OP megas, trappers, momentum moves, elf stall.