On the topic of repel, I haven't had a chance to test it yet. I'm going to try it with a cleansing tag (found in Pokemon tower) instead of repels to save money. But my theory is that: Using a lvl 26 Pokemon will repel any pokemon lower than 26 witch means the more common Pokemon you won't encounter, it will still take as many steps to find the rarer ones. So more steps to have an encounter, but when u encounter a Pokemon theres a greater chance of it being a rarer Pokemon. So basically it saves real time by keeping Pokemon u don't want away. Not really making it quicker on running into rare Pokemon.
EDIT: welp looks like Reazh beat me to it, we were talking about it in game
