I agree that there's an enormous difference between raising Pokémon naturally and handpicking every littlest detail about your team.
ENORMOUS.
Training a pokémon team up to go up against gym leaders is a totally different game from crunching stats and metaconsiderations to beat a reigning enemy team type. Just because they are still related to each other in that they're activities within the same game's parameters does not mean they're the same thing.
Different.
I'd totally join this thing, but I still haven't even cleared the gym leaders in the current generation, and also have no wireless at all.