Well, yeah. Endless mode will always eventually require cheese to progress, that's almost inherent to its nature. When the enemy has 500 "deal 2,5% more damage" and "take 2,5% less damage" tokens, any "fair" Pokemon strategies are not viable anymore and there is no way around that. Endless mode is always gonna be an unbalanced clown show and they shouldn't bother balancing it.
The game doesn't need more modes, it needs to make Classic mode good. It needs to move far, far, far away from the starter system and make changes that add variety to the game. Pokemon is not a balanced game, but Pokerogue basically goes out of its way to ruin any existing semblance of balance.
-
The pacing of Classic mode sucks. Runs are way too long and the level cap being 200 throws the balance way out of whack. By level 50, 99% of Pokemon have reached their final evolution and learned most of their available moves, you hit this at around wave 70. This not only means that for over half of your run, your team stays pretty much the same, it also means that Pokemon that are powerful early and weak later (such as Butterfree or Bibarel that are much stronger than most mons you'll have between levels 10-20 but fall off really hard) are completely redundant. In Firered/Leafgreen, the Elite 4 are around lvl 50-60, which means that your Dragonair will not become a Dragonite (lvl 55) until you've reached the very end of the game. In Pokerogue, it reaches its peak in the first 1/3rd of the game. So why bother with anything but the lategame behemoths?
-
This is further exacerbated by the egg moves. There's a reason your Charmander starts with Ember and not with Flamethrower, there's balancing going on here. But Pokerogue just gives your Pokemon full movesets starting from level 1, making your runs even more static and disincentivizing switching your team up even more. This also makes it so your late game scaling mons like your Dratinis are punished even less in the early game, because having low stats doesn't matter when you have Core Enforcer as a STAB move while your enemy has Tackle.
-
The egg moves and of course the pAsSiVeS make this even worse by being exclusive to your fucking starters, meaning any Pokemon you encounter throughout the run will be strictly worse than the Pokemon you start with which makes me want to bash my head against a wall. So not only are you even further disincentivized from switching out any mons you start with, you are also disincentivized from starting with any early game-focused Pokemon because all that matters is the late game and you don't get rewarded for winning the early game harder.
A Pokemon roguelike could allow you to use so many different Pokemon. You could use a Pidgey and a Butterfree early when they're at their relative strongest, switch them out for a Tauros and a Weezing mid game and late game you can get the heavy hitters like Dragonite and Zapdos or whatever. But Pokerogue seemingly goes out of its way at every opportunity to make your runs as static and predictable as possible. You can start with a Latios with a full moveset and all that changes throughout your run is the lvl counter going up. There's a reason that Hades doesn't let you handpick all of your freaking boons at the start of a run.
Pokerogue is fun because you can catch 'em all and because it's fun to watch a number go up, but it might be the worst Roguelike I have ever played. The wasted potential is incredible and the problems are so fundamental that I have very little hope they will ever be fixed. Terastalization could have been a great way to add variety by changing your Pokemon's types for individual runs, but because the developers are literally allergic to variety they have limited Tera shards to lasting 10 battles at a time, which is completely baffling because terastalization doesn't have a time limit in the main series (unlike Gigantamaxing, which lasts only 3 turns in the main series but is permanent in Pokerogue???). The main draw of Roguelikes is going in with little equipment and making the best of whatever the game throws at you. Pokerogue literally lets you handpick your equipment. It's not a Pokemon Roguelike, it's just a glorified Battle Tower.
Iirc Elon said they would be amphibious and you could literally drive them across small rivers