Alright. After long consideration and collecting my thoughts on the topic, with consideration to the poll results, and reading the comments over the past three days the thread has been on DST, along with Thorhammer's previous thread, I'd like to post my main collective thoughts on the manner.
I feel that Aldaron's proposal should remain as it is for now. After the metagame has stabalized, I feel the Drizzle + Swift Swim clause should be lifted, and suspect testing should ensue afterwards to determine if individual Pokemon need to be called to a vote.
There are numerous reasons for this.
1) Out of all the poll options, only the options of Ban Swift Swim, Ban Individual Pokemon, and Ban Drizzle support simplicity in the ruleset. I feel we cannot have a complex ruleset, and we must simplify. This means Aldaron's proposal will not do in the long run, but for short term purposes it will serve. However, every other option either supports the inclusion of the proposal indefinitely, or seeks to further complicate our ruleset. I feel this is not an option.
2) Ban Swift Swim, while it does advocate the current metagame we are in right now (which to some, might be considered relatively balanced) with the fewest bans possible (zero bans to be exact), those who perpetuate the argument that it is the Pokemon that are at the effect of the problem are correct. While I dislike the chicken and the egg arguments, simply put, it is not deniable that Drizzle does not succeed in making Magikarp with Swift Swim broken, nor does Swift Swim make Magikarp broken when coupled with Drizzle. However, Kingdra is put in to question in the same circumstances. The blame inevitably falls on the Pokemon, not Drizzle or Swift Swim.
Also, by putting Aldaron's proposal in to effect, we essentially banned Swift Swim from play, rather than the individual Pokemon. While this is not entirely true, as you can use Swift Swim and Drizzle on teams not utilizing the other ability, the implications are still similar. We recently banned Blaziken outright, with no exception to Blaze Blaziken, under the understanding that a Pokemon must be banned in its entirety, and we cannot complicate our rulesets by deviating from the simplicity of the process and attempting to put in more opinion than is necessary.
Because of this, we've essentially been playing favorites. This needs to stop, and we need to deal with the problem at hand the way we've done throughout all of our suspect testing.
3) It is silly to consider any of the options in this poll when there is still a possibility that Drizzle might be banned anyway. If that were to occur, it would make all this discussion moot. I feel that this decision should be waited on until the metagame has been deemed balanced enough to deal with the issue of removing Aldaron's proposal, as by that time we would have concluded whether or not the community can handle rain by itself at all.
4) While it was a nice notion, the suggestion of an alternate metagame where weather is prohibited isn't an option. As people have brought up, it will divide the community, and a standard needs to be decided upon. I originally thought that whatever people gravitated towards would simply become the standard; even if that were the case, there is still the fact that we have C&C Analysis done for the standard metagame, and all of it would have to be overhauled by this process. I don't think the effort is worth it. I also don't foresee many people playing the alternate metagame, for the same reasons people have mentioned. PO's server has MANY more players than ours, and even their Clear Skies tier sees very little play. It's simply not practical.
So, as I stated above, I feel we should come back to this at a later date, when people are not talking about whether Latios, Deoxys-S and Thunderus need to go, and when Drizzle has been deemed OU by at least the majority of the community. Once we have a stable metagame, we can revisit this topic, remove the proposal, and nominate, test, and subsequently ban the necessary suspects one by one, the way we should have.
I apologize if this is tl;dr, but thanks for your time.
