On Battle Tower stall teams (Emerald)

Anyone who studies and experiments with team building in Emerald's Battle Tower will quickly discover two things:
1) Offensive Pokemon cannot achieve long streaks consistently, despite dominating most opponents.
2) Defensive Pokemon can achieve long streaks consistently, but they must rely on PP stalling and other slow tactics.

There are dozens of examples of great Battle Tower stall teams. The best is probably this one, which has won more than 3000 consecutive battles and effectively "solved" the tower: https://pokepast.es/dd440666810a9ed9

That team is a masterclass in routing for hax-proof consistency. However, every battle is slow and follows the same strategy: PP stall with SkarmBliss, then set up 6 Calm Minds and a Substitute on Latios. With speedups turned off, each battle probably takes about 10 minutes if played perfectly; however, players must make decisions carefully to avoid costly mistakes, so 20 minutes is a more reasonable estimate. The big decisions come at the start of the battle; once they are made, the rest of the battle is trivial and tedious.

Reaching 3000 wins with this approach would take about 1000 hours, or 6 months of playing 5-6 hours per day. That's similar to the average time required to achieve a world record in the most difficult luck-based speedruns. The difference is the entertainment factor. Routing stall teams is fun. For most people, running them for hundreds of hours isn't. Watching them win definitely isn't. Furthermore, these runs lack a sense of progression when the battles don't increase in difficulty and the strategies don't change. While the end result of a long streak is impressive, the journey there feels underwhelming.

Furthermore, the difficulty in achieving such a streak is strongly related to the speed at which the game is played. Playing the game at normal speed -- the only possible speed if you play on console -- makes it difficult to efficiently test and run teams. Playing at 8x or 16x speed means you could achieve 3000 wins in one month instead of six. People will likely play what's most fun for them, and it's unfair to compare a streak played without speedups to one played with speedups.

Given these shortcomings, I can think of only two purposes for long streak attempts:
1) The quest to create a "perfect team" -- one that has effectively no chance of ever losing with perfect execution
2) A change of pace, perhaps to combat burnout from running offensive teams that constantly die to hax

One can probably think of other purposes, but I would argue that they would all fall into one of those two categories somehow.

Regarding purpose #1, the 3000-win team with Skarmory, Blissey and Latios seems close to perfect already. But based on the runner's descriptions about threats to the team, it doesn't have a 100% win rate. Someone may eventually create a perfect team -- or prove that a perfect team is mathematically impossible. In any case, it's an enormously time-consuming task since it involves identifying and routing hundreds of outcomes that are <0.1% likely to happen.

Regarding purpose #2, these changes of pace are fun for casual play and streaming. When I feel burned out from speedrunning, I might try a long streak attempt. In the process, I'll probably learn more about Pokemon that will help me with my speedruns. But I think I'll always come back to speedrunning after a few weeks or months, because it's more entertaining and has a greater variety of challenges.

Regarding my current project of monotype Battle Tower runs -- most of them seem to require PP stalling strats to achieve any sort of consistency. And these strats make battles so slow that the entire run (70 battles) takes 5-6 hours! Compare that to the 1 hour, 48 minute run that uses Heracross, Raikou and Slaking. Obviously, monotype teams can't realistically go for a time that low, but I think most of them can obtain sub-3 hour times if you're willing to lose 95% of your runs. And once such a time is achieved, it will be impossible to beat by using a stall team -- unless you use speedups, but they are banned from speedruns for good reason.

Running fast teams will change the routing a lot -- rather than trying to create a win condition for every possible Pokemon, you must accept that some Pokemon are instant losses if they appear (e.g., max Speed Starmies with Surf for Fire types). And I think this is a lot more fun. So my rule from now on will be to only run teams that don't use PP stalling strats.

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Tl;dr -- Running stall teams isn't fun, running fast teams is, especially for people who like to speedrun them!