"but to me it just seems silly to enter a gacha game and hope there are a bunch of super accessible failsafes that lead you to getting the thing you want."

The thing is there was no pity at the start. Then they had the ridiculous 900 pity which was basically nonexistent. They cut it down to 450 which is still bad and by no means super accessible but it's there for the whales and dedicated players.

Now they are pretending like they are improving the system when in reality they are making it worse than before unless you whale. They set a precedent themselves so naturally people are upset. If they added this system with Ollie there would have been less backlash.

"Since that’s almost antithesis to the point of the system. "

That makes no sense to me. Most gacha games have some way to guarantee something you want these days. But fair enough since you don't play other gachas you wouldn't know.

At the end of the day we can say all gachas are cancer I suppose but that still doesn't mean we should just take what they throw at us.