And even then, ash’s Scraggy was very battle hungry. So in these cases it comes off more as ash negleting his mons’ potential

I think the problem is that for most of his unevolved Pokémon it’s never stated that they don’t want to evolve, pikachu and bulbasaur are exceptions and not the rule

Yup. There’s that

They aren’t rushing things as much as I expected. I was expecting Friede to call them this episode, but he didn’t

Yeah. I think they’ll save that for later, but let’s see

Zach the taxi driver backstory, he was doing that to make taxis have less competition

Wild zone 18.

Yeah. Quite some times

I think Ash and Alain is a better comparison, or Aang and Zuko