Pokemon as a whole is a game that touts friendship and playing with your favs, but there's a hard divide along species lines that separates viable pokemon from non-viable ones. And that's amplified in Pokemon Go where having 8 dragonites is actually a good team... where movesets are too simple to make up for stat differences, where strategy doesn't exist much beyond identifying good defenders vs. good attackers, and where type advantage doesn't make or break the battle (kinda).

I'd prefer it if species were more balanced and there was a way to train them up so that a persian with a bunch of hours put into it would usually be better than a freshly caught Dragonite. Maybe a way to go beyond species limits, maybe though buddy distance logged or something else. Then, if each individual family was rarer (something that could be afforded more easily if certain families weren't a requirement to do combat) the game would be about collecting rare species and training them up to show them off. Right now it seems like you either live in a place where 80-90% of families are available to you, which makes the collection aspect short-lived, or you're lucky to encounter a bellsprout.