It's absolutely a fair criticism. People get mad because the games were themed around expanding the ocean and expanding the land and see it as justified that it had an equal amount of water and land routes. That thematically makes sense, but they did nothing to make the water routes as interesting as the land routes or to compensate for the fact that types weak to water got hosed for half the game. They should have varied the scenery on water routes, had aquatic Pokemon that weren't water type, and made the encounter tables as varied as they were on land.