This thread is retarded. Both situations were fucking awful. The difference is that Gamefreak learned from Gen 3 by making the arbitrary dexcut no longer an issue in later generations.
From the perspective of a kid growing up with Gen 3. If you wanted to get all of the Pokemon, you needed to own Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Fire Red, Leaf Green, Colosseum and GoD (mostly for the legendaries.) If you were missing any of these, you wouldn't be able to complete your Pokedex. This was entirely 100% bullshit, which is why the games promote trading so heavily. Ruby and Sapphire, when they first released, had a ton of Pokemon you just couldn't get without hacking. Of course, buying a Gameshark and getting a Bulbasaur or Mewtwo or some shit was super easy and was a great way to piss off your friends. This was no longer a problem in Gen 4, as they had modernized how Pokemon are generated and transferred, alongside the introduction of WiFi trades and the GTS made it so you could get any Pokemon you could ever want.
Sword and Shield, despite having generations of innovation and easy transferring, alongside a subscription service built to transfer and store Pokemon, arbitrarily locks Pokemon from the game so they can be sold back to you through DLC. This is prominent in the marketing of the Crown Tundra, hyping up how every Legendary is back. And yet, despite decades of Gamefreak future proofing and staying a generation behind in innovation and graphics in order to keep the train going, decided to cut a bunch of Pokemon to get their game released in time, shows they're doing it once again for money. No longer can they use the excuse of "Oh buy the next game, then you can trade them to Ruby/Sapphire!" because they DON'T EXIST in SwSh. The Pokemon are at hostage to whenever GF decides to put them back in. That's how they defeat the players who've been hoarding all of their Pokemon for decades: Arbitrarily deciding who gets in and who isn't.
