"Not sure if unpopular opinion: I think the games should focus on balancing the level curve without using the new Exp. Share."

I understand that grinding isn't a good way of setting challenge. I've been replaying the Gen 4 games recently, and while they're still great games needing to grind can be frustrating. When Gen 6 modified the Exp. Share, it completely reversed the problem. Grinding was no longer necessary, but any semblance of challenge evaporated because you would find yourself 10 levels ahead of your opponents. I get that you can turn it off, but you shouldn't need to limit yourself to get some sort of challenge out of the game. The introduction of Megas and Affection buffs didn't help at all.Gen 5 I think was the closest we've gotten to a perfect difficulty balance. The exp scaling kept your team from leveling too far past the opponent. In BW2, Challenge Mode was introduced. Aside from the horrible way it was implemented by making you need to finish the game to play through it, It was great at introducing a properly designed challenge for the series. Enemies had higher leveled Pokemon, better AI, and some even had more Pokemon on their teams.Gen 7 solved the difficulty problems from Gen 6 to an extent by changing the Exp. Gain back to how it was in Gen 5, but the Exp. Share is still a bit overpowered and Z-Moves and Affection still give the player an unfair advantage.This may be more of a personal thing, but I don't like how the experience is multiplied over 4 times its regular amount when only one or two Pokemon have done any work. I'd rather have each one work for exp instead of most of the team waiting for exp. they didn't earn.So I think that in the future, separate difficulty modes would solve this problem. Let normal mode have weaker trainers, give the Exp. Share early in the game and allow affection to have helpful effects on your Pokemon. Let Hard Mode have stronger trainers, block affection buffs, and save giving the player the Exp. Share until they beat a postgame superboss or something. The old Exp. Share will be an item in both modes, to let weaker Pokemon catch up without overlevelling the rest of the team.And those are my thoughts. via /r/pokemon http://bit.ly/2RwjOda