It sounds strange and counter intuitive from a businesses perspective, but think about it; the 5* hall of heroes forces you to downgrade your equipment by making it all into level one 5* items, then the game expects you to either pay money or farm for days to fix each piece. It almost dosen't even reward you in the case of shields and you can't upgrade them through crowns effectively since status variants at punch are disabled, which are much more useful than meager defense bonuses he can give. The sharp escalation in grinding requirements for the 4* hall of heroes is strong enough to make players create suggestions where they ask to be allowed into tier 3 without 4* gear or suggest that players simply stay in tier two forever. Just before the 4* HoH though, they'll let you speed through and give you 2* items and UV'd equipment while they get you to add 100k crowns or more to the CE market. It's glaringly obvious spiral knights is designed to let you build up some goals then immediately say "spend or get out" after they've gotten you to raise some crowns to bump up the CE trade price.
It's even totally possible the game manipulates drop rates for each player as a means of achieving this goal; the prize wheel for example has around a fifty percent chance to make you one-off of a lockbox even though the chance of a lockbox being in the actual scoring slot is less than half a percent. Ordinarily on a wheel these odds would be equal, but by secretly weighting it OOO commits a passive lie, and potentially could be doing the same with literally any droppable. Combined that with the fact that the majority of people complaining about drop rates on anything besides radiants are typically just newbies, and the fact that all the data is being collected almost exclusively by well endowed 5* players, and it would make quite a bit of sense to suspect OOO of deliberately crushing new players.
Maybe it's not them, maybe it's SEGA continuing to be sonic boom level stupid and/or trying to compensate for having been sonic boom level stupid. Maybe it's even really just design oversight, but it's ridiculous; spiral knights uses you like a rubber until they've had their fill of filling you up, then throws you in the trash unless you're willing to foolishly spend money so you can get reused again and again. I liked this game pre-forge, but since coming back literally no game ever has made me feel like this much of a tool and I'm saying this as someone who's played Zog's nightmare. I'm an engineering major, I don't have time to be any more stupid than I already have. I completely regret coming back to this game, and I completely regret having not wrote this the first time I quit.
Yes, it was never meant to be anything more than a dress up cosmetic cash grab with minimal updates and ninja patches to pretend and suggest to the community that they're actually working on something worthy of being called content when they're really not.