You find Sam Oak incompetent? I mean I guess that depends on which context we’re looking in. Cartoon and game style, yes I can agree, certain manga he’s a bit of a badass. And then with Gary Oak turning Professor in later episodes, I don’t find him too incompetent, but that’d just be my opinion.

I’m afraid I don’t really know the manga, so I can’t comment on that, and as far as the anime goes, there’s a massive gap in my knowledge between Johto and Unova.  I’m mainly going off the games (the anime version of Professor Oak is a fun character; I’ll give you that).  To the best of my memory, Aurea Juniper is the only one who ever actually *discovers* anything over the course of the game in which she features.  Also Oak apparently spent his *entire career* creating a totally blank Pokédex and is now too old to go out and fill it.  He doesn’t actually know anything about Pokémon; he’s a glorified computer programmer.