The way I look at it is in terms of utility (how much enjoyment you get per unit time you invest in it), because breeding for IVs is a serious timesink, which I know first hand from my Salamence breeding which did not utilise any cheating mechanisms. Time and effort is something that once invested, cannot be regained, and there's limits on how much I'm willing to invest because I'm not 14 years old anymore with tons of free time to grind (and I use the term loosely to refer to having to do anything repeatedly for extended periods of time, in the attempts of achieving a certain result). I'm not strictly saying I hate grinding per se, it's just that if I do it frequently enough, I will grow to hate it.
Besides, there is no such thing in pokemon as a bragging right for having taken weeks or months of breeding to raise a pedigree. When I told my friend about my salamence, he thought I was nuts. He was the one who supplied me the initial seed pokemon for IV inheritance breeding, because he managed to luck out and get a bagon with good IVs, but he didn't spend a month fussing over the IVs breeding over and over again to try and hit that ideal spot. Looking back, I wish I followed his approach. I had invested a month of time and effort, and the return on investment was pathetic. I never used the Salamence anywhere other than the Battle Tower and Battle Dome in Emerald.
When I did my repeated playthroughs of Mass Effect 2, I also hacked the saves to save myself the tedium of having to mine for minerals in all the planets over and over again. Why? Because I'd already done it the first time round, and Mass Effect 2's gameplay focus is on a lot of things more crucial than having to do that planet scanning minigame for hours (which I did the first time round). The Salamence taught me a valuable lesson: that enjoying a game is way more important than trying to invest time and effort to excel in some obscure element of the gameplay. Of course it would have been ok if I had actually enjoyed those countless hours of breeding, but upon some soul searching, I realised I did not enjoy it.
