This era thing is a huge waste of time and resources for literally no rewards.

Not sure why you all are surprised. The game has been on auto-pilot for awhile now. I quit the game after my long time guild told me to focus on leveling up the new bad batch for the garbage Order 66 raid. And then asked me if I could leave so they could add a more serious player. Loved my guild for the longest time but they fell into the CG trap. Is anyone in serious guilds actually having fun at this point? 

And you kind of give the answer to your own rant yourself, right? You don't have to play the new content. Just let the whales whale for a month, and in the background the game exists as before. I feel like that's what all the people venting and ranting (and I get the frustration!) kind of forget. For me it's like a game in the game for the whales to spend even more money, and for the rest of us nothing really changes. It's just a matter of figuring out what kind of crystal input (the saved/earned kind, not bought) makes sense to get the maximum out of the era mode and to have the best kind of headstart on the new character (and additional rewards) once the era ends and the character transfers to the legacy mode. No?

Like right now, I spent some crystals on a bit of the currency to level my luke to 15 and I guess that's more or less where he's going to stay. I earn a bit of currency by investing a couple of minutes every day for a **bleep** highscore in the whaliseum and collect the currency to hopefully get an aurodium LST in the store for 5k. And according to CG, I will have luke at R0 or something once the era is over (and I don't need Luke anyways). So all is good for me - still a FTP game that offers as much fun or not fun (in the eye of the beholder) as before :)

But maybe I'm mistaken - that's how I see it right now.

PS: and I'm not strictly, but mostly FTP. Got some of the cheaper LSBs and the Episode Pass twice now, just because I felt like it.