Training is great and everything, but a starter bird wouldn't win in a matchup with any fully evolved mon, let alone a legendary.

Ironically I was just thinking "like what if evolution trees were more fleshed out and went further, so some filler trash like pidgey ends up having a path to turn into the legendary birds or something comparable." And the more I thought about how, mechanically, that would work I came to the ironic conclusion that instead of pokemon being looter-shooter weapons, they should be more like the weapons from Monster Hunter in having trees and upgrades.

Then again all of the Pokemon values they express in the series falls apart when you look at the fact that it's possible to trade a Pokemon, and there's an incentive to do so. It really fucked me up as a kid seeing ash trade his Butterfree and then later feeling sad when Butterfree left on his own accord and was sad. Pokemon are depicted as sentient and it's bizarre at this point they still incentivize trading with the tagline: Gotta Catch'em All!

Yeah, that disconnect between how the story is just "they're real and smart and your friend" and everything else is "so we gotta sell two identical versions of the same game but with different collectables, and we gotta move all these gacha card packs, and..."