#plus even if it IS “only six pokemon no exceptions” you're out in the wilderness for weeks on end so who's gonna be around to enforce it?

[duckapus]

So you know how in Scarlet and Violet you've technically got a team of seven Pokemon and nobody bats an eye even though one of the Big Rules of Pokemon has always been the Six Pokemon Limit? Well, I'd say that's good evidence that said limit is only legally in place for Official Matches.

The way I figure it, most traveling trainers can only handle having around five to seven Pokemon on-hand at any given time, since, well, you've got to be able to care for yourself and your Pokemon while living out of a backpack(albeit a backpack that's clearly significantly larger on the inside than out, but still) with a somewhat unstable source of income (namely battling other trainers and selling cool junk you found on the side of the road). If you're a League Trainer who's got a full, varied team of six that's seven actual living individuals with wildly different dietary and hygiene needs, sleep schedules, personalities, and relative levels of sapience to keep happy, healthy, and battle-ready, and the Pokeball's stasis properties only do so much for the physical needs and not really anything at all for the social and psychological.

Plus six is a nice, round, even number, so it's good for Official League Stuff, and for standardized equipment like Pokeball Belts and similar Ball Holster Items, and eventually it's so culturally accepted that it's out of the ordinary to have more than six in your active party, to the point that most people forget that the full wording of "Only Six Pokemon" is "Only Six Pokemon in Official League Matches". But not so out of the ordinary that anyone will actually care about your bonus Dragon Bike.