Just to clear some things up, playing God is a figure of speech, something being hard to find is not the same as it not being available, most people don't breed pure strains for the environment but rather what they get out of pure strains (if you want to get into it then you could say they want the fish how God made them). Only people who have the resources to be shipping and breeding ecologically safe fish are the ones that breed them to be released into their environments. Most fish that people want to keep pure don't even have an environment to go back to, so for the sake of the species itself, they keep them pure. That's not to say species (not exclusive to fish) haven't been saved by hybridization nor is hybridization in nature an unnatural thing, as many species have been the result of such, but when the notion that it is the result of human activity that they don't have a natural environment anymore, some people feel a sense of accountability in that regard. Dwindling and endangered species aside, going to the trimac bit, some people just want the full experience of a species and would like to see things like an f number or a locale to know they're getting that full experience. While line bred and hybrid fish have their charms as individuals, I personally notice a difference in behavior between them and my wild strains of the same species. And yeah, some people, myself included, do it for the nature aspect, but just for the sake of the feeling of validation that comes from being able to replicate nature and seeing natural behaviors come out in the fish I keep. Digging out nests and burrows, grazing biofilm, foraging for microfauna, pushing ground cover around and out of the way so they can sift and kick up sediment in search of food, dances, breeding dresses, etc. Again not to say you don't see that in captive fish, but just some of the things people get more of from wild fish.
