Should the game be inherently fair? Part of the fun is rewarding exploration over time as a life-long pokemon trainer trying to catch them all. You gotta go to all the regions to accomplish that. Maybe it'll take a long time!
No, but the fairness should be based on skills and engagement, not the size of your wallet.
Would you frown upon Geocaching as well?
What determines success in Go? Is it battles, or is it literally just collecting Pokemon?
The idea of Pokemon was started by Satoshi Tajiri who used to like discovering and catching insects and other small creatures locally. From that developed finding Pokemon and having them fight was added to make more of a game out of it. It's now the world's highest grossing media franchise with $88bn revenue according to Wikipedia, way ahead of that Marvel and Harry Potter nonsense. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...)
It's a bit up to players if they want to casually collect, or fight or compete or whatever. In Pokemon Go at any rate.
Which, for a lot of cases (not universally, of course), is a function of your wallet's size anyway. Depending on your income and/or net worth, you can afford to spend a lot of your time on those, or not so much.
Niantic talk about physical activity and community. Their business model is in app purchases and local advertising. Mechanics encourage controlling local territory.
However, if it's setup so that it's basically impossible to get them all, but you can get many or any, then it doesn't feel as bad, especially if trading is an actual option that works. If the special and/or limited ones are more cosmetic, it becomes less of a chore and more of a "look what I have".
But if you know for a fact that there's some you can never get (had to be on the moon in 2005 to get it), then the pressure is off.
Part of the desire is the collectability. To be able to get a rare, prized Pokémon. In the original games, part of this was centered around there being two editions of a game, with some of them only in the other, with the desire to make trading a social activity. That said, it certainly didn't stop people from buying two Gameboys, two copies of Pokemon, and collecting them all on their own.
Some folks just have a compulsion to have everything.
I don't think "maybe it'll take a long time!" is an apt response to "the game is unfair". The parent isn't objecting that it's unfair because it might take a long time, they're objecting that it's unfair because many people can't afford to travel the world. Maybe a better response would be:
> Should the game be inherently fair? ... Maybe it should take tens of thousands of dollars!
While I don't find that compelling, it at least seems more logical IMHO.