I would argue the problem is the other way around. The pressure to spend has been increasing and the power creep has been increasing a lot. If you don't get the characters then you will struggle in the Heroic sith raid, Territory war and Grand Arena for a while and by the time the character comes back you will be missing out on something else for a while.
Fleet is also dumb right now with only the falcon under Ackbar being viable. If you didn't get him the first time around then tough luck getting into top 20 or even top 50. Also way TOO MUCH rng with this team with assists. Ships has been way too RNG since 2.0.
In the past characters were much more easy to farm when they were in stores, or if they were on a hard node they were still farmable in multiple locations and with multiple currencies, whether it meant on a cantina node, in the GW store etc. Now characters are ALL put on single energy hard nodes and it takes forever. The shift began with some of the Rogue 1 toons.
