It took me a good while to get a pomegranate, but that was partly my own fault for not planning for the two parent plants being active in different seasons (I haven't played with gardening much since i got seasons about a year ago because gardening has been so bugged so I'm not used to having to consider that) so I didn't always have cuttings ready to go when I should have. The orchid on the other hand, I got very easily, well before the quests asked me for one, probably because they're smaller plants so it was much easier to keep them sheltered and in season at all times. Once I got a spliced tree, I made the mistake of only doing one, not thinking about the seasonality problem again, and also forgetting that I don't get 10 harvestables from every harvest anymore, so that brings the chances of getting what I want way down, so then I had to wait for that season to come back around to work on getting more hybrid trees. I was working on getting the reverse splice grown (so I'd have one cherry on apple, and one apple on cherry, for two seasons with an active tree), and also decided to graft both onto a lemon tree, since that's always in season. And then I realised my spellcaster in the household could duplicate fully grown and spliced trees that would produce harvestables the next morning, so I had him do a few of those, and BAM, next morning I had my first pomegranate! So that tree's growing now (and since I don't have room for even a little greenhouse without seriously disrupting the garden, I've used moveobjects to plant my little baby pomegranate just barely tucked in under the shelter of the porch roof so that I don't have the seasons problem again 😢 )
All of which is a really long way of saying, if you can take the seasons problem out of the equation, it's not too bad, and if you're under time pressure, more plants can really help increase your chances of getting results asap. Of course, a dice roll is a dice roll, no matter how weighted it is. A 1 in 10 chance (for example) does not actually mean you'll definitely get the result you want within 10 tries. Sometimes you just have terrible luck and it takes 20.
