So, this isn't really a question... but... there has been something that has been gnawing at the back of my mind for a while, and I'm curious what the rest of the community thinks of it (and I have no idea where else to post it).
The way that we tier older generations is suboptimal.
We seem to be against changing old-generation tiers, except that we still change them anyways. When people come to the site and look at the Strategy Pokédex, they expect that when they see a Pokémon at a certain tier, then that is (roughly) an indicator of how good the Pokémon is. In general, Pokémon in Ubers are better than those in OU, which are better than UU, which are better than RU, which are better than NU, which are better than PU, which are better than ZU.
But this isn't always the case. The example that I will be using for this post is Gen 5 Venusaur. Back in the days of Gen 5, Venusaur was quite good. In fact, it was OU. Why? Because it had Chlorophyll as an ability, which was pretty damn broken in combination with Drought. So broken, in fact, that later, after Gen 5 had long-ended, Smogon decided to ban Drought+Chlorophyll in Gen 5. If we weren't so insistent on not changing old gen tiering, Venusaur would have almost certainly dropped to UU, and probably even to RU.
But we don't change the old tiers, so Venusaur is still listed as being OU, thereby falsely telling people that it's a good Pokémon to use in the Gen 5 metagame. It isn't. Because we changed what the Gen 5 metagame was: it used to allow Drought+Chlorophyll, but it no longer does so. The fact is that bans/unbans cause the metagame to change, but tiers are not allowed to change with them. It causes the tier list and the "what Pokémon are good" list to become out of sync.
Logically, the solution is to either restore the metagames to the point that they were at, at the time that the generation ended; or to continue to update tiers based on usage stats. However, each of these carry problems. Restoring the metagames to what they used to be just invites people to break them using our modern knowledge that we didn't have at the time. There's a reason why each of the banned things are banned. But updating the tiers isn't really a good option either.
Few people play old generations compared to the modern generations, and this is ESPECIALLY the case for tiers below OU. As such, any one individual person will have much, much more influence over tiering in the old generations than they would in the new, which could result in very high tier-shifts, and thus rapid shakeups of the metagame, especially in lower tiers.
So instead, I propose a third option: allow the tier leaders to "re-tier" Pokémon as they see fit. If a Pokémon is clearly mis-tiered, allow it to be moved, as though it were simply a banned Pokémon in the lower tiers that is now suspected of being unbanned. After all, there's very few Pokémon that are "wrongly tiered" like Gen 5 Venusaur is. It wouldn't be too hard to just move them around accordingly.
As I said, people come to Smogon and view our Strategy Pokédex to find a rough indicator of how good a Pokémon is, but with our current system, the tier list and the "what Pokémon are good" list are out-of-sync. This would cause them to fall into sync again without being too disruptive.
Is this a good idea?