One thing I appreciate about the new palworld release is that if you really just like a specific pal, but you still wanna minmax for stats or work suitability, there are plenty of options to unlock the potential of low-level pals.
Have a fuckin chicken with miserable IVs from the very beginning of the game, but it was your first catch and has a nickname and everything and now you're attached? You can make that the best goddamn chicken that ever lived with a combination of items. You can just minmax the fuck out of your favorite chicken. Max out its miserable 1-1-1 IVs. Put hella powerful dragon-type moves on that thing. Do whatever you want.
Or if you really like a specific species and want a bunch in your base but that species is just not really good at anything, you can work on that too. My current situation is that I'm in the late game and need a number of pals who are good at cooling machinery, because the best machines run hot. The pals that do the best cooling "out of the box" are Bastigor, but they're huge and take up a lot of space, use a lot of food, and are hard to catch. I really just don't care to use Bastigor. But I don't have to! I'm mass-breeding Icelyns and increasing their stats with condensation and handbooks instead!
I dig it this style of game design. Here's a bunch of creachurs and ways to customize them, now do whatever you want forever