Re: Latency and unlockables issues?

Full characters are not customizations, they are character variants. If you highlight your sunflower and scroll to the right/left you'll find the Power Flower. The character packs contain full character variants.

I assume you joined a Garden Ops session, since you're experiencing lag.

Garden Ops are host-based, so you are connecting to another player. Upon said hosting player not having great internet, you will experience connection/latency issues. Try creating your own session, making you the host, having other players connect to you; rather than joining and you connecting to them.