As someone who's played plenty of games with rare, time-limited items, I've always been in favor of giving them to everyone regardless of what I did to get my own. I own a tradeable Black Rose in Team Fortress 2, an item which people value at absurd prices ranging from hundreds of real dollars to over a thousand. Yet I would rather have all players get access to the knife as they were originally meant to, when it was an achievement reward for playing a different game. There's no reason this knife, essentially just a cosmetic skin for the default Spy knife, should be withheld from players who want it.

An exclusive item may gain attention in the short term, but it inevitably lowers the quality of the game in the long term. It is not a good sacrifice to make, dismaying newcomers and potentially even turning away customers entirely. There's many games I refuse to play simply because it contains time-restricted cosmetics. Why should I pay for a game that thinks players should be permanently unable to get some items because they didn't have the psychic foresight to play at a certain period of time?