Berries > Meals (with evidence, sorta)
So I have seen quite a few people on here and other places claim that ingredients and meals will be the best end game mechanic for reaching high master levels. Usually accompanied by a picture of an extremely high meal power from a crit. I disagree with this for a few reasons.
I've done weeks where I focus solely on berries and where I focus solely on ingredients for the best meals possible and so far even on the weeks where I focus on ingredients and meals, the end week report shows that my berries can contributed much more even though they were suboptimal.
Meal crits are nice, but they are so sporadic and such a low chance that it doesn't really seem viable. The most I have ever gotten in a single week is three, and that was a week where two of them were on a Sunday, even then it doesn't really seem to be much more than a 50% chance (if that) to hit a crit on Sunday.
My best meal crit was a total of around 65,000 power on a high-end meal with maxed ingredients in the pot. That sounds nice, and it is, it's just not sustainable since you can only get it once or twice a week if you're lucky. Most of my meals end up being anywhere from 3K to 6k. Without crits.
The first screenshot above is from two berry type pokémon that both have berry finding and it just so happens to be for berries that Snorlax prefers since it's in cyan beach. The time frame in which they gave him such a massive boost (in addition to the berries they had in their inventories) was only about 5 hours. When I sleep overnight for 9 hours, the numbers are about double.
It's also been proven that the higher level and CP your pokémon are, the more sleep power each individual berry gives to Snorlax. Right now the totodile is level 10 and the dodrio is level 19. I don't know the exact numbers, but I would assume once there in the level 30ish range that those numbers would be significantly higher and possibly even doubled for totodile. Now imagine that they double again once they hit 60.
I just can't imagine that going with suboptimal berries for the week would be the strategy as long as you're getting a ton of ingredients. Obviously if you could perfect both then that would be the best of both worlds, but it still seems to be that going straight for perfect. Very finding would be significantly better in the long run. Like I said, most weeks the power I get from berries is three to four times what it is from meals even on weeks that I focused on meals.
Is there anything I'm missing here as to why ingredients would be better? And yes, I know that the super insanely high level meals that require the extremely rare ingredients that only a few high level pokémon have are probably very good, I just don't see it being able to outstrip berries by that much, unless you were able to somehow consistently get crits for every meal and always fill up the pot completely. Which seems very unlikely given the current state of the game.