Conquest Why?

I didn't understand much of that.  Unless you've had a total mare, I think you should be red-crating at 12.8.  I will agree with the data-disk rng thing though.  ZA does seem rather vital.

I'm at 11.8m and I was concerned about hitting red crate and was able to get there this morning. I was able to avoid half of the boss/mini feats and not even fully 3 starring half of those nodes. I did every global and sector feat and 3 starred almost all other nodes for the red crate.

Are there any in particular you are struggling with you'd like advice for? I know the CLS feat against Traya in particular took me a dozen attempts to even 1 star it, then I had to mop it up with GLeia, which was almost not a 3 star but fortunately I pulled it off in one go. I generally take notes for this game so I'm happy to offer some help with teams I used on some of the sector/global feats. Just let me know which ones in particular would help you out. 

CG knew going in to this conquest everyone and their brother wanted The Stranger for his kit.  This IS the only way to do so, so they revolved almost all the feats around pirates, not many have them at relic 8 and only about 6k have GL Hondo.  It is straight up a tactic to get folks to buy conquest pass and reward spenders.  This particular conquest was not for average players.  I didn’t do that great this go either and it’s honestly no big whoop.  Yes it’s frustrating, but most of the player base was not the target for this round.  I did enjoy fighting old raid bosses and seeing and watching what I predicted, the Stranger ruins GL Leia.  

A few points in response, I don't actually care about unlocking the Stranger, although I will anyway. I'm at 12.9mil GP and mostly FTP (less than the price of a AAA game in 8 years), and I've been earning the red crate for the last year or so. I have the new pirates relic'd, but none of the new ones at 7* yet and it took me a week to get the red crate.

I'm at 12.9 GP and I was struggling more than I would have expected, but got to the red crate with a bit of an effort. For me it was impossible to get the Sector 5 wins with a full pirate squad (maybe not the right data disk setup?), also the Vane/Silvo survive feat in Sector 2 was one I decided to skip. Don't have Maz and the new Pirate GL yet, so missing a few code cards there, plus the Savage feat on the Sector 3 boss.

So for me the main struggle was to finish the Traya Boss feats in Sector 5, and I had to remod my BH team completely to finally get it done. Then it was just a matter of slowly grinding the "win with Quiggold/SM33 on the squad" feats for Sectors 3 and 4, that JUST got me to 630 for red. So, not much wiggle room, but in the end I had 4 or 5 days left after getting to the red crate. 

As CaptainAhen said above, let us know if you need any specific advice for teams/counters - apart from the above, it went kind of smoothly for me through most of the normal nodes.

You should probably look up guides or something, or otherwise get better at roster management and mods. I have over a million less GP than you and never questioned getting red crate (the final Traya feats took me more attempts than I would've predicted given the other bosses, but I still got it done, and it turns out I also would have probably been fine skipping them). 

The biggest issue was remembering how to use the old raid teams.  Sadly, CG got a few of the comps wrong.  Prime example is the Clones vs. Gam Guards.  Without Rex, the team does not work too well.  I had to run it more times than I would have liked.  However, by the time I got the red crate, I didn't need the sector 5 boss feats and skipped those, and was only at 5/10 for sector 5 pirates, so that could have allowed me to skip even more of the boss feats.  For someone with almost 13M gp, this conquest should not have been difficult.  I'm at 13.2M and finished in a week with only three refreshes a day and I never found a single ZA disk.  I also still don't have GL Hondo yet either.  Getting Maz to relics was a big help.  Also, since this was quite pirate heavy, the best way to get a lot of these win ten battles with "x" new toon is the JML/Wat combo.  Those two plus say Jedi Cal and Jedi Knight Luke and the required toon is usually a cake walk, especially after you get the boom voice disk.  Just tank tech JML and go to town.  It is a little tricky for the Quiggold one if he is low gear since he taunts as well.

You know that you can skip the boss feats and just unlock Smilo Ren in 4-6 months instead of 3, right? 

Traya boss fight is complete garbage requiring perfect turn order and i have fully decked out teams r7 just a joke this conques

I like ZA but Weak spot is really good too or Caustic Emissions or even just using Booming Voice. I had an easy-ish time with this one but that is likely because my guild stressed pirates for the raid. I get that some haven’t invested much into pirates…but why haven’t they?