From my experience it’s actually the reverse. Hardcore players like the chase. It’s the casuals that get annoyed when they don’t get the BiS gear easily.
And I agree with your points. The friction in getting the best gear is what makes the chase interesting. Otherwise you just have D3 where you play for a few days to get everything and then leave.
To be fair Path of Exile showcases an alternative method which overall seems to be accepted more.
Which is that you basically never ‘brick’ an item but instead the chance for your outcome is miniscule. But since you can front-load your crafting material collection and then spend it all in a single crafting session it feels a lot better overall.
So I would say fair to argue a item shouldn’t brick, and fair to say that instead the difficulty to acquire it should come from systems which don’t remove the chance - as miniscule as it might be - to get a better outcome.
Nah, that’s gamers overall.
Just think about it, one mechanic which is in some games and makes exactly ‘0’ sense.
Pay to progress in single player games with a end-point.
And people use it!
They first buy a product to then pay more to see the credits earlier!
If that’s not the pure description of ‘insanity’ then I don’t know what is 
As long as the timeframe to get an item is actually ‘reasonable’.
Which the flip-side of the coin is what D4 presented people with their ‘chase’ items. 50k play-time per drop? Fantastic! I’ll just need 20 years to play heavily to drop a single one, no other way for acquisition existing… great goal, right?
The good space is when ‘improving the current status’ is viable, even if needing a bit of investment time-wise… but if your upgrade is basically a special item which drops ‘as is’ and not something you build towards piece by piece then it becomes a different perception, it suddenly is not viable to even attempt.
It isn’t.
Games are a hobby like anything else is.
If you don’t have time for a hobby you don’t have time for a hobby, simple as that. Can’t keep a garden when you’re away a full week at once regularly. Can’t make a model-train if you got 10 minutes a day of free time.
Same here. If you think you can’t invest enough time to do your hobby then search for another hobby, that hobby simply isn’t for you.
Seasons changed the game, and that changed how players view the game, so blame … hmmm. I want to blame PoE as the introducers of seasons, but I’m not actually sure.
Well, whoever did it, blame them. Now players want to be able to build a 95% complete (I just made that number up! it’s fun!) build within half a season. Why half a season? Because all these games have seasons and another game’s season will have begun.
So, a month and a half to be 95% complete with a build. So, no, not being able to get an item type with at least some of the affixes that are required for a build isn’t ‘good’. It’s just annoying. I’m going to leave in a month and a half anyway, and when I think about whether I want to return or not, all I’m going to remember is the annoyance.
If I was to try to look at this psychologically, I’d say that the folks who tolerate almost never getting what they want, tolerate it because when they do the joy is so extreme they’ll play for another billion years are those that frequently have gambling addiction issues (no, I’m not a psychologist, yes I just made that up). The rest of us just want dinner, play the slots (and lose) as a lark, have some fun, maybe come back next season. If the house stacks the odds too much in their own favor, we simply don’t come back.
Edit: hey, sorry I resurrected this thread, I just felt that the impact of seasons upon players was important enough to point out.
It actually started with D2 ladders. PoE was the first to introduce seasonal mechanics, though, as far as I’m aware.
Actually 100% right.
It’s an addiction and one we should be aware about and accept to have. Being addicted to something doesn’t mean it has to be inherently negative after all, often is… but not always. Sports-addicts which don’t overdo it and ruin their bodies definitely have nigh no downsides. And gaming is fairly benign as well unless you overdo it with the time investment.