I mean, I see what you're saying in the "the customer is always right" sense—it's Niantic's problem to solve if the majority of people playing their game want something other than their game.

But suppose Niantic don't care about making billions of dollars from an audience of "everyone", but only intended the game to be interesting to, say, 8-to-14 year olds with lots of time to kill wandering around in their small towns not finding much of anything. I don't think it's valid to criticize Niantic that another audience glommed onto the game that isn't that audience, and then is demanding an experience Niantic didn't intend.

A comparison: there are these cartoons in Japan about little girls being cute. They are marketed to little girls, who are intended to identify with the characters. But for some reason, a lot of grown men watch these shows, although nobody ever marketed the show to them. As you might guess, the grown men want different things from the shows than the intended audience does. And the grown men have a lot more money. But that doesn't mean that the show should change, does it?

Also remember, Pokemon Go is a franchise license. It was likely intended, in part, as a loss-leader marketing experiment for Nintendo to revive the Pokemon brand. Franchise licensees, before anything else, have to serve as good ambassadors for their franchise. Even if that means not making money. To do otherwise is to possibly get your license revoked, and for these franchise-licensed works, the licensed IP is usually 99% of the reason people (both in and out of the intended audience) are paying any attention. Making Pokemon's intended audience want to buy more Pokemon games, isn't necessarily more important a concern to Niantic's businesspeople than making a billion dollars from IAPs is; but it is certainly a more life-or-death concern. It's something that can't be traded away even for great benefit, like regulatory-compliance in a bank, or safety concern in an engineering project.