Grinding gear is fine because its on a character the player wants to play. Telling someone they need to grind a couple months to play the character they want via a character they want to play less totally ignores player motivation.
Yes. I can tell you from personal experience it feels even more lousy actually trying to unlock it. I haven’t felt this burned since playing F2P MMOs in the late 2000’s. Its like they forgot about all the bad practices that sunk those F2P games. Designing grinds for grindings sake with no consideration of player motivation is a bad business practice. The mmo graveyard is full of reminders of that.