Hello I love this challenge so I'm making a little pastebin where I will write down things that I think could be interesting if improved! PLEASE NOTE: This is by no means a way for me to complain about the challenge because I don't like it. Quite the contrary: I enjoy it so much I want to see it thrive, which is why I find it worth it to make a document like this.

- Friendship evos should probably be based on evo BST/how bad the typing is. Riolu evolving so soon is probably due to Riolu's base friendship, but that's a little bit unbalanced compared to other evos. An easy out would be to just delete the friendship gauge and be given a friendship charm after a gym or whatever, just brainstorming here.
- Speeding up is a little too good for leaderboard scoring. This might be a challenge, and I could even be wrong, but I believe getting more runs in is more worth it than trying to curate each individual run. I believe quality over quantity is a more interesting dynamic.
- Something that could be very interesting is running a monthly leaderboard as well--that would keep the challenge fresh. A reason why Pokémon Speedruns lost quite a bit of interest is because going for world records became either not worth it or it became too stale. This situation is clearly not apples to apples, but the concept of keeping things fresh could be very interesting applying something like this--we could even add a hall of fame for those who have done best throughout seasons! Perhaps even create one per type, as obviously some are harder than others. Perhaps to make it more competitive we could use a minimum of runs that was somewhat sizeable. 100 or so would be reasonable (thanks Steveh for this suggestion!)
- I believe A3 needs a pretty big overhaul. A2 is fine as it is, but I believe A3 doesn't really show consistent real difficulty. I think combining Rival segments with others is a good step forward, but adding extra randomness with the items kind of just serves to be frustrating and not really more challenging. This needs A LOT of thinking, as I believe the proper step forward should be taken very carefully. We don't want to fall into what other challenges that tried to step it up a notch have become. (Thanks Super__Tony for this suggestion!)
- The Wild Encounters reward in Forest is an interesting case. Most of the people I've talked to agree it's the best reward out of them all. Some of them think it's not close (myself included). This creates an environment where status is more common: you can't pick status heals because the other option is 3 or 5 wilds. Sure, you can pick status heals regardless, but who really wants to pick what might be agreed upon as a worse option? You could argue this makes you feel hopeless against status, since you picked an option that should be stronger than the rest. If you die to the wilds, you know what you got yourself into. You can accept your fate: it's a risk that you calculated. Getting statussed has a different energy to it with so many moves in the game. I don't really have a suggestion for this, but I thought of things such as changing the 5 wilds to 3 but getting a status heal instead of a potion. I'm aware potions are less valuable than status heals, since you already get 5 of them, but being helpless against a mechanic such as getting burned with a physical attacker feels very crappy. It's a percentage play to simply imagine you won't get this outcome, and think that's a problem.