>>58096370
Nemona feels unremarkable (from a character perspective, her design is alright). One purpose of a rival is to serve as a wall for the protag to climb, but this role is overdone and is already filled by the Pokemon League in general. The other purpose can be a narrative conflict, where the rival represents a different approach to a problem, opposite to the protag's approach. The issue here is that the protags have to be blank slates, so they can't have unique goals/perspectives/approaches of their own, only the generic power-of-friendship, save-the-world and become-champion goals that players have come to expect. So outside of Silver I guess, there is usually nothing for a rival to oppose from a narrative standpoint.

TLDR I don't know why we have rivals anymore outside of it just being a tradition. Instead, I'd be fine with more friend characters that have completely different goals like Hugh and Arven