To me it's the absurd amount of RNG that distances Pokémon from being a decent competitive game. Sure, I don't think there's a game that doesn't have RNG, but Pokémon takes it to such entirely new levels it's not even funny.
Objetions to the idea of a game with random elements being competitive are rooted in the idea that an individual match is how you determine skill, but that's not true for games with random elements
think about poker, poker has a completely legitimatly and vibrant competitive scene and yet poker is perhaps one of the most random games out there, on any given hand is
completly possible that the worst player at your local poker night beats out one of the world's all-stars
but that's not how you play poker, the results of a single hand in poker won't be enough to advance in a tournament or even win the table in your local poker group, you have to look at a much
larger sample; in local games playing a dozen hands is pretty common, in tournaments players may well play
thousands of hands
you see, over several games all randomness evens out, you're just as likely to get that 10% freeze chance as your opponet if you play enough times, and skill at the game means you know what skills to develop and how to capitalize on them so in the end the players with the most skill clearly shine through
now in poker that is because it's a game of expected value, players can't be sure of the absolute value of any move but the best players find all the tiny ways to up their win percentage and that is also true on pokemon
the question is simply how to highlight this in our tournaments; the first thing we have to do is
move away from single elimination, instead tounaments should be Round Robin style with each player playing against every other player in the tournament with the player with the highest win percentage declared victor
(Hey kids, I plagiarized this from some professional source somewhere,
can you tell from where?)