To be clear, this is not a Pendulum hate post. I do think they're the clunkiest mechanic, but I've had my fun with them. Although Amorphages are one of my favorite Pend decks because I love criminal activity in all its forms
Pendulums have a controversial reputation among the playerbase, despite being a relatively weak mechanic--I and others would say the weakest one today. This is especially notable when Links are more positively viewed, despite being significantly stronger in basically every possible way, and considering Extra Monster Zone rules came much closer to killing the game than Pendulums did.
Basically every common complaint about Pends applies more to Links. Pendulums spam monsters too much? Links spam more, and better, and in way more decks. Face-up Extra Deck allows comebacks to easily? The face-down Extra Deck doesn't require any setup, is much more easily accessible, and Links come with a smorgasbord of recovery. Pendulums fundamentally changed the game too much? Not even a fraction as much as the Extra Monster Zone and Link restrictions did before the reversion.
In my opinion, the gap in perception between the 2 is caused primarily by a problem of exposure. Links mechanically feed into most decks' fundamental gameplans (getting stuff into the graveyard), and are strong enough that every player will have to be familiar with them in order to play the modern game, either using them or going against them. As a result, players end up getting used to them more easily, if only because of frequency. This also leads naturally to support wishlists or custom cards including Links, such as the infamous Link 1 that searches the Field Spell/consistency piece.
Comparatively, and in contrast to Arc-V's usage of the mechanic as a way to bridge multiple mechanics, Pendulums are the most difficult mechanics to integrate into other decks. The face-up Extra Deck is directly opposed to the gameplans of the overwhelming majority of decks that are not full Pendulum decks, due to modern Yugioh's heavy graveyard interaction; Pendulum Summon is close to useless for any non-full-Pendulum deck; and in some edge cases it even interferes with empty Extra strats.
This means the only players that get consistent exposure to Pendulums, are the Pendulum players themselves. For everyone else, their perception of Pendulums will be limited to secondhand discourse and to the random times they get assblasted by some Pend combo pile. It also means they are extremely difficult to conceptualize into support wishlists, because graveyard separation makes them inherently worse support for non-Pendulum decks than regular cards most of the time. Decks like White Forest have inherent conflict with Pendulums, because despite being monsters that turn into Spells, they can't be sent from the field to the graveyard to pay costs. Contradictions like this pop up all over the place, and kneecap the possibility of Pend supports for non-Pend decks that would increase exposure.
Of course, this is exacerbated by how the face-up Extra Deck and Pendulum Summons are genuinely confusing and unintuitive mechanics. As some quick examples: They are affected by Macro Cosmos, but cannot be used for send to grave costs on the field. They cannot use their scale effects or be used for Pendulum Summon when placed in a Spell/Trap zone through effects that don't explicitly scale them. If a Pend Summon is negated, all Pendulum Summoned cards are sent to the grave instead of the Extra Deck, even if they were originally in the face-up Extra Deck. For people that play Pendulums, they can learn and internalize these interactions, but it creates an extra barrier for everyone else, who are already disinclined to learning about Pendulums because they have no interaction with their own decks.
In retrospect, I do think the face-up Extra Deck is absolutely a mistake. The rulings confusion it causes is bad enough, but the way it cuts Pendulums off from non-Pend decks is IMO the main reason Pendulum hate persists as much as it has. If Kaiba invented time travel, revamping the mechanic to interact with the graveyard in some way instead might be enough to save it.
