I can think of no other example in the entire series where the central sidequest has been a snipe hunt tbf. Yeah looking for some obscure Triple Triad card can be tricky and getting all the Monster Arena unlocks in X can rely on getting lucky in random encounters but they are not in and of themselves exercises in tedium, or at least not until you try to 100% things. Aside from the storyline marks in Taejin's Tower, me and Jess only went after four or five of them, because it was so incredibly smurfing boring tracking the stones down and having to look through them all to find which has changed.

Writing off my criticism because it's supposedly a core element of the series strikes me as missing the point. I'm not arguing that the concept is a bad one, I'm arguing that it was badly implemented.