I think there's a philosophical layer to why nerds are so fucking dreadful about Pokemon in particular and I feel like it has so much more to do with age and cultural context than anything else, those specific valences being 'you're going to get old someday' and 'most video games are primarily designed for a market of people younger than you'
let's be extremely real here: it's not an accident that the protagonists of the Pokemon series are consistently somewhere between ages 10 and 14. it also isn't an accident that when I was 12, I was more excited about Pokemon than literally anything else in the universe. it is calculated and intended for an appeal to young teens and pre-teens. and often, it becomes a totem of your best memories of pre-teen life if you're into it.
the problem is context. you got older; Pokemon did not. Pokemon is always 10 to 14 years old and was the day Blue and Red hit the shelves in America. and while 'gotta catch 'em all' is a fun slogan, it should really have been appended to 'gotta catch 'em all within the limits of developer sanity.' as of Sword and Shield, there's 890 of the god damned things series-wide, and maybe that's actually kind of an unreasonable amount of uniquely-animated game entities to ask for.
but because Pokemon represents the wide-eyed wonder of youth emotionally to so many people, I understand -why- not having all 890 in a single game feels like a 'betrayal,' at least on an emotional level. some fundamental compact has been broken, a break in continuity between your inner emotional reality of the series and the actual reality that the series is, in fact, a product intended to be sold at market.
@hystericempress See, I'm so accustomed to MLP:FIM merchandise being limited in ways that get rid of key characters. "We only want to make seven character molds, so we'll pretend Spike and Luna don't exist and put in Celestia." "We only want four, so Rarity and Applejack don't exist." And so forth. 890 characters? I would never expect a fave to be in there unless I were boring and my fave was one of the initial three starters!
Like Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li. narrows eyes at Third Strike
