There are so many more cool ideas than just difficulty that people could be focusing on in fan games. I honestly wish that more games would try different stuff.
Which do we think is going to happen more often? Or I can spend several days making an interesting dungeon. So if I want to add 2 hours of play experience to my game, I can spend 30 minutes tweaking levels and moves on a gym leader that will make the player have to grind. That requires a lot of thought and design to make it fun and engaging. Compared this to the effort that goes into making a unique challenging puzzle area.
In order to make a challenging gym leader you just need to give it high level pokemon and edit some moves. Frankly, I think the reason people do this with their games so often is it's easy from a design standpoint. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum, but challenge like that is just boring to me. At this point it just feels like the expected gym leader experience is that the first time I walk into a gym, the leader will have pokemon about 4-6 levels above my pokemon and they will all have moves to cover their weaknesses. I'm not sure why so many fan games keep going the route of high difficulty. I don't have feedback for specific games, but I will give you feedback as a player. Are there any other difficult fan games that you wish included difficulty modes? I had to evolve my Aguade just so I could beat him (Aguade doesn’t evolve until Lv18, mine was Lv19 when it evolved because it fainted in the battle when it reached Lv18). His ace has a low Defense stat, but it knows Defense Curl. His Cubzero is also knows Ice Fang, yet his is Lv14, but Cubzero doesn’t learn Ice Fang until Lv18. His Pengliff knows Aqua Jet to deal with Kidling, and his Cubzero knows Thunder Fang to deal with Aguade. However, two of his three Pokemon know freaking EGG MOVES. The first gym leader’s Pokemon are Lv13-16, and they are Ice type. Pokemon Sage, while only a demo, I wish would include difficulty modes in the final version (it may or may not, we don’t know). I’m all in for increased difficulty, but I wish that these fan games included difficulty modes. There are plenty of difficult Pokemon fan games.