I hate the Festival Plaza. I loved Join Ave from BW2 and expanding that concept would have made a lot of people super hyped. Instead, it is one of the clumsiest and poorly implemented features that ever made it into a main series game. It seems like every single time Gamefreak takes one step forward, they take two steps back to make things difficult for the player.
The main issue is Festival Coins, specifically how they are obtained and the acquisition rate. It's tedious and horrendously implemented. In comparison, Pokemiles in gen 6 were implemented perfectly. You gained them passively just from playing the game normally - from walking around, from battling or trading with others, Streetpass, or even Pokebank if you needed extra. You accumulated them automatically and you only needed to Game Sync every so often and could redeem them in-game or online for cheaper prices. You could buy really cool items like PP Ups, Rare Candies, and Heart Scales that are extremely useful.
Festival Coins are nothing like this. You don't accumulate them automatically while playing the game, they must all be obtained within the Festival Plaza and nowhere else. You get some from battling and trading online, but it's a pittance. 2 for battles, Wonder Trade, and link trades, and I think 4 for the GTS. You must talk to the NPC in the castle individually every single time you do one of these to get the FC, which is impossible on Battle Spot unless you leave and re-enter after every single game. The most lucrative way of getting FC is by spamming the same tedious and boring challenges over and over again. The challenges require you to pay attention and even if you work your ass off, you often won't get the full amount because it's also dependent on the group participation score. It doesn't scale with the amount of people doing them, so if you only have a couple of people helping out, you're going to get a puny amount of FC not matter what. And uuuuugh - that stupid fucking Alolan greeting animation takes forever and is one of the most pointless timesinks in video games ever. It's cute the first time, but not when you're expected to interact with literally thousands of NPCs.
To put it into perspective, you need well over 17,000 FC to get a lv100 plaza. At a rate of 2-4 per trade/battle/what have you. Or you can lose your mind by grinding the bland and boring challenges hundreds of times, rarely getting the full 50 FC due to time constraints (sometimes it puts you into one with only half the time remaining) and low group participation. And every single time you must endure the 2 second long greeting animation. Even if you're not aiming for that, the 5 star facilities cost an absurd amount, 1500 the first time you buy and I think 1500 is added to the cost each additional time you want to buy it. It costs 10,500 FC to outfit your Festival Plaza with all 5 star facilities, assuming no duplicates were purchased. Yes, I know there's the Fortune Teller tents, but you have to be lucky enough to find someone who will introduce you to one and get to lv30 to unlock all the features. You also need to grind the first 1500+ from scratch at the ridiculous rates I mentioned above and the boost is still RNG afterwards, which necessitates buying multiple tents. You can try and get them for free, but the tents you get are completely random and only when you level up. The odds of getting exactly what you want are low because first you have to roll for the correct facility and then the correct number of stars. There is no way to upgrade existing facilities. You will also be forced to buy them anyways because the most useful ones are version exclusive, like Rare Kitchen.
I wouldn't be such a sourpuss about it except important game features are locked behind it. Let's start with leveling. Hyper Training was touted as the answer to all of our legendary softresetting woes, especially since UBs and Tapus are almost mandatory. No longer would we have to gen our Pokemon! we thought, until we actually played the game. You can only Hyper Train lv100 Pokemon, except that Gamefreak not only took out reliable means of XP gain (RIP Battle Chateau and Blissey Bash) but also reimplemented gen 5 XP mechanics, which is massive nerf on XP gain for Pokemon above lv60. They even removed XP gain from the Daycare so you can't afk on your Tauros to level. Pokepelago's rate is pathetic. 5 stars Rare Kitchen is the most efficient means of leveling said Pokemon, except that it's Sun exclusive and you need a couple in order to feasibly level up teams. When all that's said and done, you need to start with a Pokemon exactly at lv66 and still need 2 Rare Candies after feeding them everything on top of the FC cost for the food. Why this overly punishing system? Gear treadmill MMORPGs are far less punishing than this, and they make their money forcing you to run the same content over and over again so they get their subscription money. I bet that the Insane in the Membrane achievement in WoW would take less time than leveling a team of 6 to lv100 just grinding the E4. Everyone expected Bottle Caps to be the limiting factor, but nope, it's levels. You are almost required to deal with Festival Plaza as it is the only thing that prevents Hyper Training from being a useless feature, otherwise the leveling system makes it inaccessible for legitimate players.
Version exclusive clothing is also complete bullshit. Red is my favorite color yet I got Moon, go figure. There's also a few pieces of clothing that cannot be obtained by dyeing. Even if you find an NPC that has a piece of clothing you want, it's RNG as to which one they will sell you - you can't select which one you want to buy. You also can only buy clothes from trainers that are the same gender as you, which is understandable for some clothes (although I would prefer all unisex, but I disgress), but I'm out of luck if I want to buy glasses or hats from the opposite gender. What the fuck? For those of you upset about things like no panda hat for female trainers in XY, Gamefreak has managed to give you even more of a massive middle finger.
Thankfully, homebrew became much easier than it was before so I can edit my save file to get what I want and be done with it. I don't like cheating because I like to play games for what they are, but I have a busy working schedule and I don't have all day to grind this bullshit. I was going to buy Powersaves, but Datel is greedy and wanted me to pay extra for "early access" to codes. Without homebrew, I would have to pay an extra $25 to make Pokemon playable, but the problem is that Gamefreak is completely clueless when it comes to the needs of the competitive playerbase who play on carts. GF is like Bethesda, you need mods in order to make the game playable, and Festival Plaza is living proof of all of their shitty development decisions.
/longrant