but I want to say that I think if your main tiers start from a similar/the same initial point as Smogon and you have much less of a playerbase then all of the development of the OU meta will happen on Smogon and PO will at best be playing catch-up;
at the very least there won't be a significant difference between the two metagames in terms of ruleset (one or two different pokemon permitted/banned) and due to the much smaller playerbase smogon's ruleset will effectively be 'better' due to having so many more people actively involved with it if nothing else.
The OU council members are (obv) actively involved in Smogon and so will be involved in the understanding etc. of their metagame and so it's not like the two metagames are likely to diverge in any sense in terms of rulesets anyway, irrespective of how dedicated those same council members are to PO.
I'm not sure then in that scenario what happens to PO's not-being-smogon niche that it has over PS when you're left with what's essentially a worse/dieing version of it that's not doing anything really different.
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