That's fair, I did only post a one liner. I kinda just wanted to get that off of my chest because I had been holding onto it in preparation for my spl game. I'll post replays after this week for at least my team, because my test matches involved playing a bunch of people who are also prepping for spl.
For gardevoir, I think that gardevoir kinda sucks, but it definitely has its uses. Hyper voice spread damage is really good in a format where honestly, there's not that much spread damage. There are a few spread damage dealers on standard teams: fini, zygarde, and zard are the only ones that deal real spread damage that I can see within tier 1 and tier 2, and most of tier 3 (kingdra i'm going to deal with slightly later, and hyper voice salamence isn't real you can't convince me I won't believe you). Fini is dropping off in viability as a calm minder imo, as gengar's removal has somehow led to higher tempo games that cm fini can't always find its place in. Metagross has always been pretty good against fini in balance games, and idk, it's just felt a lot weaker. Zygarde has also gotten a ton weaker as its band set vanished with gengarite. Zard is pretty good though, I'll give you that. Landorus doesn't use earthquake, because the tier doesn't have good ground immunities to pair it with besides zard.
What does that have to do with Gardevoir? Fairy type spread damage is really strong, especially when there's not much other spread damage in the format. It hits for neutral or SE on most pokemon, doing large chunks of damage. E.g.:
212+ SpA Pixilate Gardevoir-Mega Hyper Voice vs. 252 HP / 28 SpD Landorus-Therian: 196-232 (51.3 - 60.7%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
212+ SpA Pixilate Gardevoir-Mega Hyper Voice vs. 0 HP / 4 SpD Tapu Koko: 214-253 (76.1 - 90%) -- guaranteed 2HKO
212+ SpA Pixilate Gardevoir-Mega Hyper Voice vs. 252 HP / 0 SpD Tapu Fini: 135-159 (39.2 - 46.2%) -- guaranteed 3HKO
These being spread damage numbers is really good and sets up damage for the rest of the team. Note; garde can also psyshock fini if it gets boosts up, which is also good.
Further, Gardevoir can set trick room for itself, giving it access to a bunch of supporters that it can use that are strong in the metagame, like amoonguss, lurantis, araquanid (I'm not sure they're all good with it though) that need trick room to thrive and value other mons being chipped.
Garde fits the definition of '
Pokemon which, while good, only fit on a specific team style or require heavy support but are still stronger than Pokemon in the tiers below.
as Gardevoir probably requires a fake outer and probably tailwind to do what it really wants to do. However, I've found that gardevoir puts out really good damage, at least on my team, and I imagine on others (I have a few versions of Gardevoir Rain that I enjoyed).
On rain. Rain is really good in this format. In a format where the best megas are charizard, metagross and manectric, rain manages to put in a lot of work. You would think it would do the same against Gengar, but for some reason the trapping really worked out.
I think that having politoed and pelipper lower on the tier list than kingdra makes no sense, so regardless of where kingdra goes I think politoed and pelipper should be higher, especially because I believe both of them are viable on rain teams. For reference:
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7doublesou-420908,
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7doublesou-423686,
https://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/smogtours-gen7doublesou-424500
Three clean spl replays where rain beats the nominally countering weathers. I can also link a bunch of replays where rain tears apart metagross teams, none of which got a showing. Rain as an offensive archetype is really strong. It's also somewhat versatile; the first replay shows Perish Rain trap with kommo-o, a kind of cheesy odd archetype, the second is a very offensive team with 3 rain sweepers, and the third is Garde Balance with 2 mon rain added to it. Admittedly in the third replay the rain doesn't get to do much damage, but the presence of politoed on my team scared out charizard and prevented EmbC from doing a ton of damage with his charizard in the midgame, and would have been useful in a bunch of circumstances.
Rain is coming up big in SPL, and I have a bunch more replays of me winning with different rain teams in practice for spl which I can link if anyone wants. I think it's clear that rain fits the definition of 'Pokemon that are generally strong, but can be dead weight in some matchups, don't have great matchups vs a lot of Tier 1 and 2, or are only particularly useful for checking a certain team style.' There are a few matchups where rain gets blown up (SMB destroyed me with a team that had all of the counters, for instance) but rain is really strong in the meta and I think the VR should reflect that.
I didn't deal with kingdra specifically but holy shit that mon deals so much damage it's so strong