Bearadactyl

First, refrain from calling me babe. This is the only time I will be nice about it.

"I think the reason I've never been much of a competitive battler is because Pokémon's metagame has a long history of being over centralized."

That was my opening statement, and that's the problem. The centralization goes against the morals the games attempt to teach. Even then, over-centralization is boring and creates stagnation.

The only thing stopping me from playing competitively; is the inability to use all of my favourites, or the Pokémon I have particular bonds with.

I wish Game Freak would step up and come up with means to make ALL Pokémon viable; Mega Evolution was actually a very nice potential remedy for it. Though, honestly I think it would just be a bandaid.

I'd imagine all except few (Like Luvdisc) are designed in consideration to their location in the games. For example, Mankey is mostly inferior to Machop, but since Mankey comes earlier in RBY, it's actually viable ingame since it's the most reliable way to beat Brock if you picked Charmander.