The controls in tabletop/docked mode are completely useless.
I move the JoyCon in the same way every time and my balls fly all over the place.
Also, it feels like the controls work differently depending on where the Pokemon is and whether it's moving or not.
When the Pokemon is standing still directly in front of me, I can throw a ball straight at it fairly reliably, yet when I try to do the same thing while it's back and forth in front of me, my balls fly all over the place. And if I try to aim to the left or right, my balls go in the opposite direction. So I think "hmm, maybe the controls are reversed" and aim the other way, and it still goes in the wrong direction, like nothing I do matters.
I don't understand these controls.
I'm not kidding you when I say that I've wasted 15 balls on trying to catch one Pokemon and not hitting it once, only to have it run away, and this has happened multiple times.
I really don't understand these controls.
In handheld mode you're controlling the camera so you can at least see where you're aiming, and it actually works. I don't understand why they had to make two completely different control schemes when the handheld controls would work just fine in tabletop/docked.
I'm not sure if you're even supposed to be able to aim your throws in tabletop/docked, because it doesn't seem like aiming actually makes a difference. Or maybe I just don't know how to aim. The game doesn't really explain it, so I'm left to guess.
I thought maybe I'm just dumb and don't understand how the controls work, but seeing that other people hate it as much as I do, they are probably as bad as I thought.
They took all the worst parts of how catching works in Pokemon Go, and somehow made it worse. In Pokemon Go when you miss a Pokemon it's either bad timing or you just suck, but here it seems like the aiming itself is RNG when playing tabletop/docked. Couple that with the frustration of the Pokemon knocking your ball away the one or two times you actually DO hit it, and you have a recipe for increasing frustration.