I have trained 2 monsters to tier 6 from the ground-up (as mentioned above, dang monsters don't transfer in New Game+), and I've noticed something important. Each individual monster type seems predisposed to make gains in certain stats, along with the random factor for gains for all monsters. For example, while one of my monsters was a Cave Ape, he would make jumps in strength even when I wasn't training him specifically for strength (and when I did train him for strength, he would make HUGE jumps in it), but I could never get him to learn techs other than one in his core element (water), even when I trained him in Antiquity. As soon as he changed to another monster type, though, I was able to teach him two more techs almost instantly. I could be way off here due to the random nature of randomness, but it seemed to happen too often to me to be a coincidence. Has anyone else had similar experiences?