I would say turn AR off. It really doesn’t enhance the experience that much (it’s a nice gimmick, but it gets really old really fast) and makes the game like 2-3 times harder to play. Against a Pokemon like Zubat, AR is a literal handicap.

Not necessarily. Or rather, there are exceptions. Off the top of my head I know Eevee’s for example hatch from 10km eggs, and are one of the more common pokemon floating around. The saving grace is that Eevee has 3 different (randomly chosen) evolutions, and hatching an egg gives you like 20 candies.