I've seen this asked multiple times over the past 3-5 years. Here's my usual answer.
In a word, yes. I’d say get the original, that way you can see what the franchise was like when brand new. If you don't like them, you can usually sell them for what you paid to get 'em. There are some bugs in the games, but they aren't major; they games don't crash randomly when you open a menu or take a step, for example.
If I remember right Nintendo & Ape/Creatures inc. did help with the games’ development. GameFreak was mostly a magazine; they’d developed one game, Mendel Palace. They developed a few others while working on Pokemon, but they didn’t have the experience needed to develop an RPG by themselves.
The biggest bugs are esoteric stuff which would take 2-3 specific steps to find, kinda like the Minus World in Super Mario Bros. They should’ve caught the ghost/psychic reversal, & maybe that invisible computer, but beyond those two errors I don’t know of anything which FX the gameplay.
Apparently, the games throw a ton of errors behind-the-scenes, but beta-testers wouldn’t be privy to that.
The games are more complex than the average RPG, since Red/Blue/Green have to track the stats on 100+ player-controlled characters, all of which can be transfered from one game to another.
Honestly, by the time they were released, Red/Green had taken too long to develop; the Game Boy was on its way out. GameFreak, Nintendo, & Creatures inc. probably didn’t expect to get back their whole investment; they probably did the minimum patching needed to release the game. After all, a partial loss is better than a whole loss. Nintendo, Creatures Inc, & especially GameFreak, didn't have much of a choice by 1996; they had to either write everything off, or they had to release the games.