I fail to see the point in this thread, for the most part, since a good chunk of the replies are more or less "It's hard because it's supposed to be hard. Why is it supposed to be hard? Because it's hard. That must mean it's supposed to be hard, so it being hard is perfect," which doesn't answer the question posed by Azery in the first post.
Some replies actually provide feedback and insight, though. And then we get stuff like the post above mine that, again, make me wonder why this thread even exists. If you (Redemption) ask for feedback, and then just say "well, you're wrong" to negative feedback and future worries, why are you asking for it in the first place? Might be a better idea to get together and discuss the feedback, then reach a (relative) consensus on the response to it, rather than sounding hypocritical.
And, so as to not make myself a hypocrite, I suppose I will need to give my feedback: Most of the lower-bracket difficulty is team-based for the challengers; if your team can't deal with the type, it will not work very well. If your team is neutral or better, you'll win, almost for free. In other words, there's very little strategy, since it's basically saying "Okay, [leader] will do this strategy in this format, so just CTeam them and win, or get hax and lose anyway, but that's Pokemon." This is due to there being a ton of challengers, many of whom watch each-other's battles. I don't bother with watching other people's matches in the higher brackets yet, since I'm generally busy with life, so I can't provide any form of accurate feedback on them. I suppose I'll side myself with Pyrro's feedback toward the upper tiers for the time being.