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I had my party between 44 and 52 when I started my winning go of E4, going with my "usual" rule regarding item usage. That is to say, only start using items once I can beat two of them without any items at all. Once I could beat that treshold(okay, so having my Mienshao 'GinTonic' be said lvl 52 'mon helped a fair bit against the Dark fellow). N and then Ghetsis went both down relatively easily due to both having frikken oodles of fighting-weak pokemon. End result was my Zebstrika, previously easily my strongest team member, still be level 44 while my newest acquisition Mienshao was 57... I didn't even use Zekrom in the fight, because of my innate loathing of legendaries(and let's face it, it's one ugly customer) and wanting to be able to win without any #@@#% legendary abuse.

But, maybe partly because of much higher game knowledge, E4 just never will be quite as brutal and hard as they were back in the first gen. Now granted, first gen E4 started with the ludicrously high levels of 54+, five pokemon each. But that was also hard because I knew nothing about the game - I was literally just trying to evolve my Pidgeotto to Pidgeot(lvl 36!), and thought that Tackle was the best move ever. So, yeah.

Editum Addendum:
On topic regarding training things: the experience gains post-60 are just so high it's stupid. Cynthia's Garchomp gave roughly 15k experience(granted, that was with Lucky Egg and traded exp boost, but still). And the rerun of E4, while relatively hard(each has a full party of lvl 71+ pokemon, Champion Alder even higher), gives enough experience to Exp.Share train a pokemon from 1 to maybe level 45 or 50... In the span of just couple of days, I got my previously-bred NidoranM and F to Nidoroyals only few levels shy of 90...