I have heard no such news, because I live under a rock with a stack of books.
But really, good lord. You’re telling me they finally managed to make something that broke the Uber tier? The metagame that was perfectly content with pre-Drizzle-nerf Kyogre? That Uber tier?
I think power creep is a legitimate concern. The problem is that, given the way Pokémon works as a franchise, Pokémon get more stuff every generation, and very rarely have anything taken away from them (even the loss of moves taught using TMs or move tutors is often temporary). It’s very rare for a Pokémon to actually become objectively inferior to a previous version of itself – which means that Pokémon who don’t get much attention or whose design doesn’t justify cool new powers easily will just get steadily weaker and weaker relative to everything else that’s going on around them, and often those are Pokémon who were pretty terrible to begin with. Farfetch’d scores more critical hits now! And also Mega Pinsir exists so f$#% you, Farfetch’d. Now, Pokémon has never really cared about game balance anyway, so to that extent you can sort of just say “eh; screw it,” and more to the point it’s probably impossible to balance something as old, vast and heterogeneous as Pokémon without ripping the whole thing apart and basically building a new game from scratch (I mean, if you want an example of how hard it is to create balance that satisfies everybody, take a peek at the Starcraft II forums some time; they have people whose full-time job is making balance tweaks, and there are only like 50 different units in the whole game, but two-thirds of the forums is just people screaming about how obviously and horrifically broken they think the game is – and these people are the fans, or at least I think they are). On the other hand, it sucks when your favourite Pokémon is one that’s just objectively not very good. Vileplume is my favourite Pokémon and the truth is that Vileplume is terrible compared to a lot of other Grass-type supporters like Venusaur and Ferrothorn. And yes, you can say “well, no, you have to look at Vileplume in its proper context, which is the NU tier,” but the unavoidable fact is that the existence of tiers is the result of the fanbase bending over backwards to do something that most other franchises would regard as the developers’ job, and the tremendous volume of hatred that gets inflicted on the poor Starcraft II balance team is instead pointed at bloody Smogon.
Basically what I’m getting at is that whether power creep is harmful sort of ties into the question of whether you think game balance in Pokémon is desirable or even possible, and we are not even close to answering that one…
Pokémaniacal 