Okay, looks like I have to eat my own words here a little. Or whatever the term is in English. It's also a little late in the evening, so I don't know if this is even relevant to the discussion.
Anyway, it should be said then that GameFreak DO care for balance. Not necessarily competitive balance on the "1337 OU" scale, but the balance that makes the game fun to play.
The way I see it, entry hazards, or Stealth Rock to be exact, skewed this balance somewhat. Yes, entry hazards are a most welcome "spice" of the game, but with the addition of the Rocks it burned the candle from both ends. Its effect on some Pokémon is too devastating to ignore. Even if the opponent does not attack, a Charizard will flat out faint if brought to the field with Rocks in play twice. Meanwhile, Pokémon like Torterra or Swampert (hugely popular due to their starter status) will pass the rocks almost unscathed. And there is only one move you can use to remove the rocks. It has 20BP and poor distribution. By all means, it has a fun impact on the metagame, but balance-wise, it was a mistake of GameFreak. I think they have realized this in Gen. V, seeing as it's no longer a TM and has rather small moveset distribution. Had the move been introduced the way it is in Gen. V, it would have been brilliant balance-wise. Great move, crappy distrubution. Like it or not, it what's makes the game balanced. In Gen. IV, it was handed out to every Pokémon and its mother. The damage was already done. Luckily, the Gen. V official tourneys weren't that badly affected by the monstrous move, seeing as only Gen. V Pokémon, who weren't around when Stealth Rock was a TM, were allowed to enter.
However, GameFreak doesn't always see the impact of the numbers they put in the code before the game is released, and they don't always care to fix it. See Regigigas, who was so chained down that it's totally useless by most standards (even in-game), and GameFreak simply left it like that. For a legendary, it's surprisingly lame.
Trying to get back to BW2, the point I want to make is that GameFreak doesn't always take the state of the metagame or the wants of competitive players into consideration when making new games. They check the fanbase to see the what's obviously skewed, poll the enthusiasm and tolerance for the "wild cards", and might take it into consideration when altering stuff between versions. I have no doubt that some people at GameFreak read The Smog, if not necessarily regularly.
For instance, we shouldn't expect something being completely redesigned to fight Ferrothorn or Dragonite because the metagame is stale, but we might find a couple of the new tools nifty for dealing with them anyway. Perhaps the fabled Ice Shard Move Tutor will appear this generation.
Umm... trying to make a conclusion here.... if we get a few new tools to deal with what is "obviously broken", it's not because GameFreak read our thoughts, it's most likely to be by chance. Perhaps there will be a total change to the Top 10 in usage, but don't expect it to happen for a reason we can name. We know that GameFreak is watching, thinking and coding, but we don't know what or how. Changes in the metagame will be due to changes in the code, not vice versa.
Did any of this make any sense at all?
