>>30644781>a week or moreMaybe if you're soft-resetting for starters in gen 7, but if you're SOS chaining or hatching eggs with the shiny charm/masuda method, you can get shinies in a couple hours.
I usually just throw on some video lectures and grind for a bit.
>Not an intangible pile of code, incapable of being discerned from "soiled, worthless" hacked versionsYou could generally tell in previous generations when Pokémon were hacked. I forget the site (and it's been closed down for years now -- pokégen maybe?), but hacked mons tended to have discernible differences between legit or RNG'd (also legit) mons.
Apart from that, the owner of the shiny knows it's legitimate if they've caught/hatched it themselves.
I used to inject shinies and event mons back in gen 4, but this leads to a sort of nihilism where nothing has any value because none of it is "real" and it's all readily accessible. It's abstract, but you have a different attachment to your pixels if you've worked to obtain them.
