Heh, I've only played the originals (and the FireRed remake), but I actually didn't mind the trainers so much as trying to catch the unique Pokemon.
"Damn it Zapdos, you're at barely a sliver of health and you're asleep, paralyzed, and have most of your stats lowered as low as they'll go. STAY. IN. THE. [censored]. BALL."
*tosses 15th ball"
Game: "Aww, it appeared to be caught!"
Me: "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF"
You could just pay three ten year olds ten bucks to trade for them and you'd have all three... never mind that sounds completly moronic.
but maybe I can catch all three and trade them to three ten year olds for ten bucks and go buy the next pokemon game! ...
actually the rare ones were not the worst, you knew at least where they were and the difficulty was simply the slim percentage chance that a poke ball would catch them. in ruby and saphire there was some ugly fish that only appeared in four spaces 25% of the time which were different places for each individual game and the only way you could possibly find that out was by looking it up online.