To the stuff about the episode being underwhelming:
Darn, I was hoping Terra would be enough of a distraction no one would notice. Yes, it is, it's short and not much happens. This is because this episode happens to be the tipping point before all of the other various unrelated sub-plot lines for the past 11 episodes start to roll together. Calm before the storm, if you will.
For the field effects, I don't want to suddenly introduce new fields mid-new episode because when playing the completed game as a whole that's going to seem kind of random. That said, an introduction to field effects is veritably lacking in-game and I'm open to ideas on how to present them, aside from featuring them in gym battles and areas. Optional bosses could be nice for this and all, but it doesn't especially make sense to me to have like a random character parked under an arbitrary rainbow just to showcase that field, you know?
Tempest answer this fairly well, but as it turns out RPG Maker has terrible scalability. I'm sure there -are- improvements that could be made, but I'm really not a programmer either, and I don't know what they would be. I'm just a girl with a program she downloaded from 2005.
There are EV-reducing berries from the regrettably in-accessible department store, but aside from that I only learned about XY's Reset Bag like last week. It may not be a priority for scripting over fixing the half-finished battle system, but maybe someday.
I'm currently not terribly interested in IV increasing because since natures and abilities can already be changed, IVs are the only thing left that can be Individual to a Pokemon. That said, I do want to update the breeding mechanics to give players better control over them.
There are a number of these through out the game already, I think, such as Biggles, Mechanightmare, Mafia Dons, etc, in addition to the player-decided initiative to defeat Garchomp and the Ditto-Arceus. I'm certianly going to make more, but I don't want them to feel out of place, so I try not to go too crazy.
The game is currently balanced around having a low-mid 60 team at the end of this episode, so I hope you don't need to grind that much. I suspect you didn't, based on how easily you dealt with Samson, types aside. I'm trying to avoid having to cause grinding, as much as possible.
I am trying to pick-up production speed. No word on if it's going to work, yet... Glad you've otherwise enjoyed it though