Hoenn's victory road in the GBA games is my worst nightmare, and I usually like going through victory road.
You need at minimum 4 HM moves to get trough. 5 counting the non-required flash, but it will make your life easier on the bottom floors.
It's full of strong and sometimes annoying trainers, without flash the bottom 2 floors are a nightmare, and don't even get me started on the waterfall segment.
You can easily loop back to where you started because it all looks so samey there, I can never find the ladder to get back to on track to get to the league.
Even with flash that part is a nightmare.
Oh, and the worst version of the dungeon is in the original R/S, because of 1 little design choice. Putting Wally at the end can completely break your run of victory road, if you lose to him you have to trudge all the back through victory road just to face him again. Putting him at the end means you are more likely to lose to him
because you already went through a bunch of Cooltrainers, therefore you're not at peak performance IE. your team might not have full HP and or full PP, and Wally is pretty strong. It never happened to me, but I can totally see it happening
This was fixed in Emerald, where he's put near the beginning.
At least when you're done with it, that's it. You can just fly to the League after that.
However I think OR/AS fixes victory road completely.
It's not a nightmare to navigate the bottom floors without flash, and in general I think the entire dungeon was easier to navigate. Yeah, Wally is still placed at the end, but I don't think going back to Ever-Grande to heal is as bad as in the GBA games.
Oh, and the ending maps with the flowers were a great touch IMO.
So yeah, Hoenn victory road in the GBA games (especially R/S) is just horrid, and the random encounters don't help. But at least you can use repel for that.