Uh, the amount of silver 1's who are smarter than gold 5's?

League of legends skill isn't really based on intelligence, but I think that's what you were implying. I'd say silver 1's are less smart, but not by much because they're only one tier lower than gold 5.

I hate Silver 1/Gold 5 elo, you either get major try hards trying to get Gold and people who give no fucks because they are already in Gold.

On AVERAGE, Gold 5s have slightly more mechanical skill and game knowledge than Silver 1s. By no means do individual Gold 5 players have to be better than Silver 1 players. I say this because, in quite a few cases, the only difference between these players is a lucky winning streak.

The 5's of a division are often worse than the 1's of the tier below them. IMO this is especially true for silver 5 vs b1, mainly because of riot starting out new players at high silver ranked MMR (so even if they only win 1-2 placement matches they'll still likely end up silver 5). But I think theres some truth to this for all 1's/5's, because the 5's are barely hanging on to that division where as the div 1's have been actively climbing.

Also I think another factor in this is demotion protection, its very tough to get demoted from G5 so silver 1, so a lot of the time players who have made it to gold (for the skin at the end of the season or whatever) they stop caring nearly as much. For example near the end of last season i had a silver 5 AD thresh top in my promo game to get to silver5, the guy clearly did not give a damn nor was he actually trying to win.

Give me a team of 5x B1 over the silver 5's who are barely avoiding demotion back to bronze ANY DAY OF THE WEEK.