Question for people who dodge everything when attacking gyms

I dodge literally everything, saves a lot of resources except time.

I often train with vine whip/solar beam Tangela and at the beggining I often got myself screwed when using Solar Beam against Aqua Tail Vaporeon. Later I learned to estimate energy of my enemy to predict its special moves.

Shorter cd specials are good on training pokemons where every little bit of health saved helps, but long cd moves are usable as well if you can predict enemy specials.

When attacking gyms, I still prefer long cd super burst, because fully powered pokemons have enough health to make the sacrifice.

My verdict would be, don't power him up and save him as a training pokemon if you have plenty of Bulbasaurs around. If Bulbasaurs are rare in your area and don't expect to get another Venusaur ane time soon, power him up.

I had a similar problem with lapras. Good one with ice breath + ice beam but I kept searching for one with breath + blizzard to get the best possible.
Finally I hatched one yesterday (massive amount of candy) and powered it up to lvl30 and went for a field test. Now quite frankly I'm disappointed.
My tend to dodge quite a lot and I have recieved excellent result with ice beam. The blizzard not so much.

So my opinion is that your venusaur is as close to perfect as it gets, and if you usually dodge a lot when fighting (regardless if enemy or friendly gym) then petal blizzard might be even better than solar beam.
Of course that's just an opinion.