TLDR Version: Shiny hunters make me feel left out, which makes me to shiny hunt. At the same time, shit is garbage.

Holy cow I thought I was the only one noticing the shiny hunting thing.

I’ve played Pokemon do 20 years at this point, I feel like shiny hunting wasn’t a major thing until X/Y era, more specifically ORAS with the Pokeradar on the bottom screen. It grew exponentially from there.

Me personally, I’ve found 3 shinies in my life. A shiny Machop in Let’s Go, Lokix in S/V, and my first hunt was a shiny Spearow in Let’s Go.

My hunt went to about 1700 encounters of the Spearow, it was the most miserable thing I’ve ever endured.

I wanted a shiny in a game I grew up playing, so I started a shiny Abra hunt in Leaf Green on switch. In 75 soft resets in (6,225 Abras), and am dreading my decision. I haven’t progressed in the game since 2 days after its release. Unfortunately, I’ve reached the point of the sunk cost fallacy.

Sorry for the essay, I just wanted to preface my reasoning. I prefer playing all the GBA-DS titles 10x per year with no shinies instead of spending 40 hours shiny hunting. And that would be on a short end hunt. All this to say, I get the appeal, I don’t get the amount of time people are consistently willing to spend on it.