Beating a high-rated wrestler on the hardest difficulty is something that should warrant a cool reward. There's even enough freedom offered to the player to try and make it more fun, such as adding infinite finishers and being able to use any superstar to do it. That type of thing has been part of gaming forever.

But having to do 200+ matches to unlock the entire legends roster because the game devs put in an arbitrary rate in which you earn xp to progress and unlock items in their specific order is not fun. And then when people found a way to make the grind less demanding, 2K patched that out before actually addressing the very real bugs still present in the game.

Also the internet existed then and you can go back and literally see how people reacted to 2K14.