Idk I didn't overlevel much in SWSH
I was about on par with the trainers through most of the game
The real bad part of SWSH was the trainers are 0IVs so my pokemon would snowball anyways. I had this Salazzle that learned Dragon Pulse and Nasty Plot, and I literally used it for 90% of my blind playthrough
I tend to skip some optional trainers, depends on my mood at the time and the pacing
Fair, and I could be misremembering on this front - but the impression that I got that I had to keep rotating in order to stay at something resembling the power level of the enemy trainers stuck out to me.
For what it's worth, I think the level curve is just one aspect of difficulty, and that trainer stats matter just as much as the level curve. Hence why I rate SM and USUM differently, despite being pretty similar in terms of strictly the level curve; the level curve simply fits USUM more considering the stronger trainers that offset any advantage you've gained.
also SV level curve is good, literally just understand basic design language. people overthink this so hard. It's literally a donut. Whenever I saw wild Pokemon 10+ levels above me I was like "damn that might be a dangerous area" and then tried the other side of the donut, and if you do that it fits the levels essentially perfectly
i only found myself overleveled for one gym and then i found myself a bit under or even with the bosses for the majority of the game
I'm not talking about waltzing to Glaseado from Mesagoza and getting mad when I'm too strong for Katy, because that's counter-intuitive and I'd just be brute forcing the game, which is silly and not a fair way to evaluate the game. I'm talking about going to see all the stuff in the overworld, fighting trainers on the way and catching new 'mons, then just plowing through any and all resistance, as part of the natural way the game encourages you to play. Again, the weak boss design is a piece of this, but EXP being baked into everything you do in this game via trainer battles, catching Pokemon, and mechanics like Let's Go means that your entire team is gradually accumulating levels that I don't think the boss trainers are accurately designed around. EXP being a reward for exploration is obviously a good thing; the problem boils down to boss trainers, the checkpoints of this game, not being adequately scaled around it. In that sense, I think the level curve falls on its face.
Also like, the nature of how bosses are placed in the overworld means the donut argument doesn't make sense to me. Take Katy and Brassius, for example; the map does show you markers indicating the order you should be fighting trainers in, but regardless of whether I follow that order or not, something doesn't give. If I do the bosses in linear order (or close to it; you don't have to be religious about it for this to impact you), the game is corralling me into a specific order anyways, and that kinda defeats the point of the open world. If I do things in whatever order I choose - roughly following the donut, maybe backtracking here and there when I run into something too strong like Iono or Tulip might be - I'm going to inevitably run into a brick wall with certain bosses and just steamroll over others because of the mismatched arrangement of bosses. Let's say I go to the left from Mesagoza and travel roughly clockwise; I'm mostly likely going to get my face kicked in if I venture south to Tulip, but that's fine, I can come back later, and I just travel north. This is facilitated fairly well by Titan placement; Bombirdier gives me the ability to surf, and gliding and climbing from the Paradox and Dondozo let me scale Glaseado fairly well. If I go back down the right side from there, there is nothing that can put up a challenge;
I want to engage with the game on its own terms, but I feel like I'm being punished no matter what I do, and the level curve is a contributor to this. If I explore the open world, fighting trainers I see, catching Pokemon along the way and taking the scenic route, I'm going to wind up in one of two scenarios when I run into a boss: getting my ass handed to me because this boss is meant to be fought later, or obliterating the boss in front of me because their team is a joke and I got overleveled from all that exploring. Neither is a satisfying outcome, unless I'm able to overcome the very difficult boss - but when that happens I'll be overleveled for their neighbors, and that brings us back to the core problem. If I follow the game's established boss order, even loosely, then I'm just getting a linear experience out of the game anyways and the open world becomes extraneous. Neither choice I make in this regard is particularly fulfilling, and that's why I think SV fails as an open-world game; the level curve being one aspect of that, but not the entire picture.
...I ended up typing a lot more than I anticipated, so just to be clear I'm not picking a fight or anything. I just don't agree that I'm overthinking it somehow or that I'm misunderstanding basic design language, whatever that means. That said, I'm not going to act like I'm infallible here, and I only played the game the one time back in 2022 (and came back to it for the DLC releases) so I could be misremembering things.
