If they made the end-game characters (Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, etc) 40+hours to get, and they DIDN'T have microtransactions to get them quickly, would gamers be complaining? Doubtful.

They made the game HARD. That's good, that's what people asked for. Then they made the game EASY if you want to pay extra to make it easy. I think that's a fair trade, but that's clearly a minority opinion.