I unlocked Malak for free. I had the toons geared up already as most of them are good in tw/ga. That said, I have to agree that this is the greediest release I've ever seen. I understand the event being hard, which it absolutely was, but what gets me is the gear requirement for Malak. He requires those new gear pieces that conveniently bottleneck g8-g11. It's atrocious. They aren't raid rewards, like all g8-11 gear, and their drop rate is absolutely abysmal. Most people just get the gear with crystals.
At 2800 crystals for a full piece of gear that further bottlenecks a gear tier that was made easier with the change to the guild store, the game is going backwards. QoL and roster growth has been slowed down significantly because they set the bottleneck back to where it was in 2016. To me, it might be a sign that this whole thing has gone too far.