The spirit of the cadence (I thought) was
$ to farm --> Crystals to Farm --> hard to farm (ex. shard shop, takes lots of time, lots of free resources) --> easy to farm (in both time/resources)
That sounded pretty good and fed lots of business AND fan concerns.
It has not been realized (ex. Baze, DN never got to that last step). When tons of panic farming, premium toons (great if you have all the stuff to get the 7star on out of the bag, crushing when you don't), and (arguably) less popular/useful factions are being pushed, it is hard to find a satisfying answer to "Is there a way to keep up with the meta, TB, GW, all the toon releases while still feeding the fan in me who wants to farm my favorites?"
Answering that in the affirmative is not so hard when it takes a month to farm your "favorite" toon to 7 star (after waiting for them to get to the "easy to farm" stage), but really is rather difficult when your "favorite" gets stuck on a single hard node (or event that comes back 1.5 times per month, for example).