Max Raid battles in general. I can never find anyone to join me, the timer always runs down to zero with no other players being found, so I always have to do them alone, and the game always pairs me up with the absolute worst NPCs for that particular raid. I just can't do five-star Max Raids at all, they're just too difficult to do alone. The Isle of Armour is especially annoying for this, because I've been trying to gather Max Mushrooms so I can Gigantamax a few of my Pokemon, but even after doing the customary three Max Raids required for the mushrooms to spawn, there have been a few times where no mushrooms have appeared, so it feels like I've put in a lot of time and energy for no reward.
There is something very wrong with how
Pokémon Sword and Shield connects to other people. I can't really determine what it is, but I find myself able to join other peolpe's Max Raid Battles much easier with certain workarounds. Doing things like setting up a Surprise Trade or doing a Link Code League Card trade seems to "wake up" the game and be more alert to find ongoing Max Raid Battles before time runs out.
Time of day also seems to be important. During afternoons and evenings, in North America, for instance, I can find a lot of people, as well as afternoons and evenings in Japan. Right now though, the novelty of Isle of Armor has mostly worn off, and there aren't quite as many people as there were before...though occasionally, that leads to me finding people more easily. Other games I've played, like
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, had netcode that, for some reason, made it easier to find people when fewer people were online. It's hard to predict.
Yeah, you're right. I was mostly thinking of IVs being chance and the fact that just regularly going through the game your Pokémon won't end up EV trained, and level grinding's a pain. While level grinding is lessened by Max Raid battles giving out EXP candy, the fact that I can't do it online makes it so that I don't want to do it much due to the NPCs. Though, the fact that I can't go online also means I can't do competitive against other players so the only thing I'm really grinding for is the Battle Tower, which you need to beat to get Bottle Caps, which you need to have good IVs, which you somewhat need to beat the Battle Tower. Though at this point I can't remember what point I was initially trying to make. Mostly that it's really annoying to do competitive.
Going through the game WILL, in fact, EV-train your Pokémon. You're just going to be training it in pretty much random stats.
I do get what you mean though. It's not like most other games with a competitive scene where you just select your character(s) and you're good to go. There's an insane level of customization in this game that requires you sink a lot of time to get your Pokémon exactly to how you plan them to be, and there aren't many shortcuts short of hacking. It completely baffles most other video games' competitive scenes (and some competitive scenes of games that aren't video games).