Catering. To. Whales.
CG seems to be trying to leave F2P players in the dust by pushing actions of "You can make a big jump in progress, but you need to pay us lump sums or 20 different micro-transactions!" With the marquee characters, obviously you should need to pay if you want them super good at day one. But by then releasing events and locking the good rewards behind requiring those same characters at high power (i.e the upcoming raid), it kind of alienates the people who aren't spending copious amounts of money. And by the time they finally grind the new toons to an acceptable level, CG releases a new event and a new set of toons and moves the good rewards from the older events, continuing the cycle.