Not locking this against my better judgement since apparently people are quite enjoying sounding off but for fuck's sake can you all please cut out the ridiculous hyperbole and generalizations. Both 'sides' are doing this and it is rather futile. For the most part no one in this thread knows the people they're arguing with well, and at least based on what I've seen during the past decadeish in the competitive Pokemon community none of you are painting a very accurate picture of what the average user here is like, or what most users here are like. It's funny too somewhat because Vineon (correctly) called out Miscellaneous for the silly generalizations he made, and then there is iDunno doing the same stupid shit on the other side.
This thread is pointless if you're just going to spout disconnected hyperbole from one extreme side of the argument at the other - nothing is going to come of that and I'm just going to lock this if it continues. If you want to make a point about something substantive you think should be changed here(or shouldn't be), great, but can we avoid trying to stereotype people that don't agree with us?
For what it's worth, I'm somewhere between both sides here. I've been part of a lot of cliquey little communities like this one, both on other websites and in real life, and I agree with people like Firestorm who are pointing out that we're a lot less elitist than most gaming communities are. I don't think that's inherently good or bad. Smogon started out a hell of a lot more "elitist" when it was new six and a halfish years ago than it was now and it's really strange to me people still try to portray it as elitist since the Pokemon forum mods are perpetually bending over backwards to try to rescue problematic posters from themselves and keep them from getting banned. I'd say the quality of the discussion on this forum and the behavior of users on it have gotten a little worse over the past few years, but because of that it's more approachable to new and "stupid/naive/etc." users than it was before.
Moderators of any forum have to balance trying to be fair to users and trying to maintain quality. There's a lot of ways this can be done, with varying bias to either side, but I'd say Smogon keeps itself pretty balanced, to the point where we're probably "too fair" to most "bad" users to really have the quality of the forum(especially in the Pokemon sections) where people might expect it, with Smogon's role in the community supposedly catering more to the more hardcore competitive types in a community about games that have historically been dominated by very casual sites like Serebii. There was a time in late Advance, early DP where most of the best players were posting a lot in our discussion forums and that just doesn't happen as much anymore, I think largely because of this shift away from elitism. There's obviously advantages and disadvantages to that, but this site does work to be more approachable than it has been in the past.
I don't think I'd want to spend much time on an internet where people had no accountability at all in the way cookie seems to want things, but I don't think being overwhelming politically correct the way Vineon would prefer it is necessarily the way to go either. I think in a community aimed like this one is a healthy dose of elitism is a good thing and that the players who attracted to playing this game the way Smogon sees it being played usually prefer that environment, but that shouldn't be an excuse to be an ass just because you can, either. It's never acceptable to be to be rude just for the sake of being rude. Some situations, I think, warrant it. But being aggressive that way should be a reaction, not the first line of defense.
Also everything I've been taught in college level psycho/soc classes has indicated that whole "omg people have terrible lives so they bully people!!" is mostly a myth and that you're more likely to do that with higher self esteem.
Also-Also Bulbapedia for life. Though I make liberal use of Veekun, too.