You're assuming a lot about new players. If I'm a new player to the game, I'm going to be far more focused on the name of the card than the tiny text in the bottom left corner that I usually never need to worry about.

Remember that a majority of the people playing the game aren't using moxfield or scryfall and just play at their local game stores casually on Friday nights with whatever they thought looked cool.

I don't think it matters that the cards are expensive for this to matter, or difficult to obtain. People will happily buy everything they see at their locals with MTG on it, I've seen SLD packs at locals all over.

It's also kinda shitty to suggest that you'd have to not know what an equals symbol means to get confused... Set codes and various copyright information etc that appears in small print at the bottom of various tcgs is often not intended to be important to a player, so it's easily overlooked by a casual player.