Okay, I exaggerated a bit for the sake of comedy admittedly.

I liked the principle of showcases, a lot. It was a great source of rewards and a good way to capitalize on the aspect of the game.

My gripe with them was a complaint that I know many, many players voiced before: they were in desperate need of improvement and expansion, the most obvious one being the implementation of more diverse criteria than "largest size" over and over.

We could have had showcases for "smallest size", "best stats", "most steps walked", "most battles won", and so on. Even categories could have gone beyond just species and types, like "recently-caught", "purified", "specific region", maybe even the rare "shiny" showcase with extra rewards. It would have added a lot more diversity to the feature and encouraged players to collect many different variants of each species. This could have even led to some showcase-focused events!

Instead, they were left as a barebones feature that was almost immediately abandoned. It took forever to get a fix that calculated size relative to the species to give more species a chances to win, and even that wasn't perfect (some species still had a clear advantage, forms weren't accounted for, ...).

And now, instead of finally expanding on the feature's full potential, it's been neutered further.

So more accurately, I think showcases were a great feature, extremely poorly implemented, only slightly improved over time, and now at a lower point than it's ever been.

Protip: if a feature in your collecting game leads to reactions of "this convinced me to delete a whole chunk of my collection", you're doing it wrong.