in all my years on the internet I've never encountered a person who gave a single fuck about contests. You can find all kinds of pokemon discussion from smogon autism to the game corner, but I've never seen anything about contests outside of being on "feature" lists. Just thinking about it now there's probably room for contest metagames and stuff but I've never even seen an attempt

why even argue about this stuff when it's clear they didn't really put any real thought about pokemon's origins and foundations until gen 3? The world was just the real world with pokemon slapped on which is why you had stuff like LT. Surge being American, Mew being found in South America, ghastlies killing elephants, etc. Gens 1 and 2 they were essentially an extremely invasive "species" which definitely had to be cleaned up if it was going to be a long running series