Here's my rant:
I have played this game casuallly and only slightly competitively since a year or so ago and very much enjoyed just playing the game. The way it is played, the environment, etc. I all loved. But the thing I loved the most I think was the metagame. SP was one of the most skill intensive, fun, and imaginative decks I had ever played. I LOVED playing my Sablock against very good players' Luxchomps and seeing how well I did. Against what everyone said, I loved it. If you prepared for it and played decks like Gyarados, donks, etc. and playtested enough, PLENTY of players made their decks work and it WASN'T just SP. People really seemed to hate SP because it was just such a hard deck to play. When anyone lost to it, it seemed broken because it was such a skill intensive deck, and required an optimal list. Granted, some people randomly playing SP might be able to muscle through certain non-SP decks, but it was the mirror matches that really mattered.
Some of the mirror SPs I played were some of the best games I have ever played, and I wish that someday I would get that with this format. The closest thing to SP i can find is 6-corners, but even still I don't find myself using as much skill as I would with SP.
The format MD-CoL was, in my opinion, the very far superior format. MD-BW was bad, I'll admit that much, but HGSS-on is just looking awful at the moment. I believe it started out well and could have been a good format;there were plenty of S1 decks running around, Zekroms, Reshis, Magneboars, Mewboxes, Donchamps, etc. and it seemed like a very healthy meta at Nats when I was there.
I just moved away from the game as it started to slow down. I can understand expensive-ish staples, but 1 M2EX per deck? That's a bit excessive considering the price and overall goodness of M2 against current meta decks. While there are checks to plenty of the basics (Kyurem loses to Cobalion, Zekrom loses to Terrakion, etc.) overall it seems like its not as much about the skill and more about which basics you decide to use in a deck. There are the obvious exceptions of Zeels, Durant, and ReshiPhlosion, but 3 decks? Before rotation, we had plenty of viable decks, both SP and non-SP, and SP had almost always a clear format with set techs and things you would play in your decks (i.e. Dialgachomp almost always ran Warps, Sablock played Judge, etc.) while the format now just seems like "Terrakion/Zekrom/Kyurem/Reshiram/Darkrai/Mewtwo/Virizion/Cobalion" with some combo of them.
The last format had donks; so what? This format I have more one-sided games than I had donks last year, and I'd just get it over quickly than dead-draw because of a lack of quick drawpower. Catcher, in my opinion, isn't a huge problem as making it go away would seem to do nothing for the OP-ness of Basics in the format now. And the sad thing is that we're getting some amazing looking basics; Empoleon looks like it would be great a couple formats ago (even if the lightning weakness might slow it down) and yet the basics seem to just overpower it.
Idk, that's just me, I sucked it up and quit, and am happily enjoying playing the VG in non-organized events.