I'd personally say personality growth isn't the focus, nor even a particularly strong part, of the animé. It'd be nice, maybe, to view it as being a more important element, but it's not - Ash's character is, unfortunately, still about as superficial as it was early in the series, if not more so, given the apparent reliance on stock characters and plots.
If, however, the animé had more depth, then I don't imagine Ash would necessarily want to surpass his father, whomsoever he may or may not be - you'd have to get into the reasons why Ash's father is or is not present, the potential relationship between father and son, and the effects it would have had on Ash in his pre-ten-years-old childhood. Ash doesn't seem, to me, to be the sort to want to outstrip his father - given that he wants to be the world's best pokémon master, I'd a) say that he would more likely want to outstrip everybody, suggesting a huge security deficit when it came to himself personally, and b) guess his apparent insecurity with himself as a person doesn't stem from necessarily feeling he has something to prove, nor that he's lacking something and therefore must make up for it, but rather because when you're ten, you really have no idea how the world works and like to think you could be something you think is cool. I used to want to be a zoo keeper, or a farmer, because it would mean working with animals; being an animal carer wouldn't be so bad in the context of the zoo, but really, when I was ten, it was more about looking at animals and being able to say "I have..." than the vocational responsibilities either job would involve. Especially farming, god.
My point is that because Ash seems devoted to becoming a pokémon master for no better reason than he'd like to be one, it's not anymore valid to state that he'd want to outstrip his father, therefore his father can't have been an Elite Four member, than it is to say that his father was killed by a large group of pokémon of all sorts and sizes in a cross-country trekking incident, and Ash's current plan is to trick all pokémon he plausibly can into befriending him before he claims dominion over them and treats them like puppets, making them do things they don't want to do as punishment for his father's death.
Which, of course, isn't to say you're necessarily wrong - although I certainly appear to be saying that, for which I apologise. Rather, my personal view on it is that his father could be or have been someone important, like an Elite Four member. Or, it could have been someone who later turned to a life of crime. We just don't know, and while this thread is about speculation and all, trying to rely too much on logic which proscribes certain possibilities due to psychology and the like is far beyond anything the animé actually enables us to do. Unlike, say, your initial suggestion that Silver's the man we're talking about. In grand summary, I waffled a lot and I really have no point, and had not such a great one in the beginning when I selected that one sentence from the very end of your post, and made that the subject of an essay more, to be frank, about the lack of character development and depth within the animé itself than anything else.
elia is his mom ,dad can be someone in the E4 