I admit it. Perhaps you feel the same. To me, the Wild Card Game is not the playoffs. Something about watching the Astros keep their team store open all night to move as many overpriced Postseason-branded hoodies as possible felt unseemly. Baseball has always been a sport that appreciates the role of randomness in its outcome. It takes 162 games to figure out which rosters are strongest, and the playoffs take fewer teams than any other major sports to acknowledge that the regular season is most important.
As a compromise, baseball decided to reward division winners more in its latest playoff expansion and penalize the pre-existing Wild Card by making them play a coin flip with the second-best non-division winner.