"post me up a list" does not serve the interest of learning/discussing/debating strategy.
I will disagree. The top decks at worlds are released each year. The cards are not tournament legal so there is no reason for people even at league caliber to buy them unless they confine themselves to league play. But printing those decks enables players to buy the lists and play with them. Doing that enables them to learn the strategy.
If they elect to drop cards from those tournament-proven decks in favor of others, it may then become painfully obvious why such a card was needed. That happened to me recently. I found a list and gave it to my think tank. The best players at my leagues (the ones with the medals and trophies) were unable to figure out why certain cards were in the deck and wrote them off as superficial. In overlooking those cards, we failed to anticipate a critical weakness of the deck which was then exploited in tournament games. One opponent used our lack of foresight against me to keep me out of the top cut.
Perhaps try a new contest to test your opinion. Instead of giving people cards and telling them to create lists and thoroughly detail a how cards work, how about you give them a list and nothing else, challenging them to decipher the strategy. From only a list, can players identify key cards for making the deck run and covering weaknesses (both inherent and metagame) in the design? What are the deck's strengths (speed, disruption, endurance, simplicity of design, offensive excellence, etc)? Are they able to work the cards to stand up against metagame decks? Are they able to explain it past
"it can't take a beating by gyarados" and
"this deck auto-wins against Vilegar"? Did those players see something--especially a strength or back-up strategy--you didn't, effectively teaching you how to play your own deck
?
You might actually force those who accept the challenge to build your decks and test them for more accurate results. Can the deck be reasonably changed to make it better but still serve the intended strategy (for example, swap Warp Points for Warp Energy, or swap Potion for Poke Healer+, or Dodrio for Magnezone prime)? Can R_A's theoretical decks really work or can one justifiably say
"the only reason you will 1-x instead of 0-x is because you'll get a bye"? To answer that question effectively, players may have to build and play with your decks, taking the creativity and theory that is taught in I Play Theme Decks into real games, when your first-timer has now graduated to the tournament scene. You could even pull a deck right off of the strategy board that looks promising but didn't get any attention.
So... I think we're going in the right direction:
1. The sticky threads are giving MORE than a mere list to people who are hungry for an understanding of winning decklists.
I actually think there are too many stickied threads at the moment. In its own way, it adds another element of clutter. A sticky thread says attention needs to be given to it for some reason, but it getting lost in a world of stickied threads undermines the point of sticky threads.