That's totally fair, like at first I could not believe I was playing a Pokemon game due to all previous games being so polished, made me a little sad. Mmm hopefully they release a new patch to fix the issues as even though theyve released one, it wasnt to fix the issues people are mostly talking about. While the raids do help a ton with providing you items like XP candies they are totally not necessary to complete the game. Theyre also a bit janky so it might be better to skip them anyway haha.