Disobedience

A big issue of the mod is how it's possible for new players to immediately ruin their experience by catching high level pokemon, so it would be nice to introduce a form of disobedience.

In the games, the disobedience is based around your badges, but my idea is to base it around your starter, making pokemon 4-5 levels higher than your starter disobey your orders. Of course this means you shouldn't be allowed to release or trade it away, but I doubt anyone would complain about that.
Opposite, it would be nice to also have a visible indicator of which Pokemon is your starter one, to never lose track of it.