It's a good pokemon, panicWhy would you make Gholdengo
That's it, that's the question. Just... why.
See, to an extent since they're frankly way too rare, I understand stuff like Apricorn balls being needlessly stupid to obtain. It's just flavor stuff at the end of the day. Annoying to be sure, but....fine, whatever.I think it's abundantly clear that GF's idea of content is to "make it take longer". Need more Apriballs? Grind for that 1% chance of them dropping from the Cram-o-matic. Need a specific TR? Only drops from a specific den and only a few mons in said den, and only rare type. Need questing? Make it something boring that requires you to walk across the entire map several times. Total game time is now at 30 hours, and so game is good.
To be fair to GF, it's quite understandable to default to that. Having designed a lot of quests myself, it takes a lot of effort to make content engaging and meaningful such that the player wants to interact with it. It's far easier to do something basic like "collect X, kill Y, go to Z" at varying levels of difficulty. And, players might be bored out of their minds but they're probably going to be able to follow/do it without much struggle, so you don't have to be worried about comprehension. Combine that with GF's tight development cycle, low staff, and juggling the creative inputs of various leads, and it's understandable. Though, not excusable - I have one brain cell so if I can do it, so can GF.
And honestly I wouldn't care that the Herba Mystica are exclusive to Raids like that. Sandwiches are a side thing and it's jsut for fun.
But one of the more "central" side quests requires a specific one! It's so awful. At least let me go beat up the titans one more time to get a freebie.
Meanwhile Gholdengo is just obnoxious. That's an actual Pokemon you're evolving right there; doing it once is a commitment but it's kind of cute. Doing it multiple times if you want more for any reason, is bad. Spiritomb "got away" with this back in the day just because it's something you can breed. At least if you just want to commit to one you can use all the easily available battle stuff.
Also I think especially the past 2 games it comes down to wanting it to be akin to a service game. Just keep grinding the raids, boyo. I dont think development issues or anything comes down to it, this is all by extremely purposeful design that would happen even if it was a 6 year dev time game.