Brushing off criticism of the monetisation of modern Pokemon as "they were always a scam" is kinda wrong though. If you compare the old and new model side by side the new one just comes out worse. This thread is glaring over a lot of issues too and seem to focus on fans that want to buy both versions instead.
With the old games you bought a $40 game, then a year later an expanded version for $40 again if you wanted to. Trading was free and smooth between all versions too.
With the new one you buy a $60 game now, then later a $30 DLC adding to a total $90. On first hand that's not so bad but it comes with so many caveats.
- You can't trade in or sell your previous version, you need it to play the DLC. At least before you could soften the price of the new version with that, now you can't.
- This absolutely sucks for late adopters. I never played Gen 4, but when I do guess which I'll get, Platinum. Before you could wait for the third version and save $40 jumping in with it, now you can't. It's going to be $90 forever. Nintendo games infamously keep their prices high and this one has more than ever reason to with no third version making it obsolete.
- People are posting that because the new 200 Pokemons are getting patched to be tradeable with the base game that they aren't really behind a paywall, but they pretty much are. GTS a series staple feature has been stripped and moved to the subscription based Pokemon Home. Trading is intentionally obtuse and finding even a fraction of those 200 Pokemons is going to be extremely tedious because it requires you to find people yourself now. Pokemon Home will probably be a $5 year subscription and you need NSO in the first place to trade, which is $4 at the lowest. Add another $9 to the new Gen price.
So you could pretty much get the "complete" experience of a Pokemon generation for $40 before at lowest if you skipped first version and $80 if you got first+third. Meanwhile SwSh is going to be ~$100 for the same experience.
It's a moneysink now no matter how you cut it, and kinda draconian tbh.