So now that the new gen is approaching, I'm seeing a lot of the obligatory "IVs should go" vs. "IVs should stay" arguments cropping up again. I already briefly outlined in my post on Cyber Sleuth why that game serves as an excellent argument against IVs, and it saves time and takes the luck out of the equation. Essentially in this era of increasing convenience for the player, IVs are a stale old 90s mechanic that should die a death.
Some standard arguments in favour of IVs and why they are bad
>"It keeps each Poke unique"
No it doesn't. You can potentially acquire Pokemon with identical IVs, natures and all the rest. The uniqueness already exists in more gratifying ways such as a nickname, date caught/hatched, and other factors like shininess/personal attachment.
As soon as you set foot in a competitive environment, everything has the same relevant IVs, because players have bred them that way.
>"It's representative of genes"
Which is fine but conflicts greatly with the pro-convenience referred to previously. It does nothing now beyond deciding hidden power and forcing the player to spend time acquiring a competitively usable mon for online or battle facilities. There are already many better ways in which flavour/worldbuilding is done in Pokemon such as non-gameplay things like the Pokedex text and NPCs. This is better than forcing a mechanic on players.
>"You're just lazy"
And what if I am? I have a damn job, I don't want to breed all the time, I want to use what time I have to actually play.
It reminds me of weapon durability in Fire Emblem. Everyone said it was a series staple, but tradition for tradition's sake is one of the worst reasons to do anything, and once it was gone, many people then found the more inventive balancing better and encouraging of different equipment setups and strategy. Pokemon should take the same approach to IVs.
EVs are fine, they're good for creating varied sets and can be quite interesting. But I believe the system needs to be even more transparent, as good a move as the Super Training graph was.
tl;dr IVs do nothing helpful for either casual or core players and only slow down the process of acquiring viable mons at an expert level.