Omg another Sylvieon forum rant, will this one cook too?

Now, I usually come on here to grill about improvements or complain about shortcomings of stuff. Of course out of love and passion for the game and its longevity.
However, today, it's quite the opposite! Positive feedback matters too, to tell the developers that something is going in the right direction.

And frankly there's been a lot of new efforts that I just wanted to express my gratitude to, and let Grey Havens know to keep up the momentum. These aren't falling on deaf ears.

First, the java updates are great. Sure they've been buggy for the most part, but just yesterday I caught myself thinking "Wait. I haven't had any of those horrendous lag spikes I used to have at all!" I'd completely forgotten about the laggy times we had a few months prior. The current state of Spiral Knights performance has become comfortable and pretty nice. Aside from a few fps drops here and there, probably on my system's side, it's been pretty smooth.

Second, I found the escape key issues had been fixed yesterday. I hadn't even noticed when it was fixed, or if it was announced, but thanks for that!

Third, the big one. Forging update is AMAZING. Farming shining and radiant fire crystals as a new player is abysmal. If a new player is building towards the meta starter loadout of Chaos + vana gear, they experience most of their power spike and game becoming easier once they manage to craft their armors to 5 star first, get chaos' offensive bonuses, then upgrade their weapons. Butt getting to that point through heating is pretty tough for a new player, which is now made much easier. Especially radiant fire crystals are difficult to farm to heat stuff. Having played for multiple years and running a LOT of vana, I've accumulated over 20k radiant fire crystals, and this is with me selling, recrafting and even doing crafting services frequently. And it's been smooth for me personally, but just doing the math I can see how tough it is for newbies. And the current amounts needed to fully heat are pretty nice. It's still a bit of a grind so it's not spoon feeding or too hand-holdy, which is great! I expect people to still actually play the game and grind, but alleviating the grind partly is also a good step. This also came at a perfect time since a few of my friends from a Pokemon community I'm in have considered checking out the game I've ranted about so much. Additionally, this introduced a grinding method for crowns, of heating a set of 0 star equipment repeatedly for quick levels, trying for cracked forge prize boxes, and selling them for 20k crowns, since the minimum reward from them is breaking even with a 1 uv ticket (worth 20k crowns) or getting a higher uv ticket. More on this later.

Fourth, Event changes. The anniversary event, Dark Harvest, Winterfest and Apocrea have all featured nice new stuff to farm, which is great! I love the new costume shields. The humbug hat and Dark Harvest hats aren't really my taste, but that's a me problem. There's been a long standing issue of there being little incentive to play Apocrea, Caketastrophe and March of the Tortodrones in particular, but these are being resolved somewhat. I think my only gripe is the incentives introduced are mostly costume shields, and at that, they're not tradable.
What I forsee from this is the events become something you play once, get the new shield, and never again.
If you go the route of having completely new costume shields every time, then these items become time gated which I believe no one enjoys.
My proposition is to allow these shields to be tradable, since then there's incentive to farm multiple copies to trade, in case a player missed the event or doesn't have the time to farm during the event period, but wants to buy it after the event duration. This introduces replayability.
The clock blocker seems pretty steep a grind and in an alright spot, but if the apocrea's shield is to be made tradable, it would of course need to cost more tokens. I think 3k is a sweet spot. Even right now it seems too low. Weapons take nearly 1.4k tokens to craft, so this being less while kind of seeming like a more premium reward is odd to me.
As for the contents of the added event items, while costume shields are great, it can become a little stale and not to everyone's taste if it's recurringly only costume shields. Some variety here would be nice, maybe reskins of actual equipment. For a while now the community has been yearning for reskins of certain weapons, or even more event craftable weapons. Fulfilling this wish would be a dream come true to us.
With Dark Harvest, I feel the incentive would increase more drastically with the introduction of more hallow items to its prize boxes. Even if it's a very rare pool for the Hallow Dragon Wings and Cat Tail, this would have everyone more invested in the event. It is already a highly profitable event as shown here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZwCZXa-ABmg1VvkICYXvT8FnO-p6vUaQ...

About points 3 and 4, a key takeaway I want to bring up about the success of these changes is also the factor that everyone wants a profit method that isn't Vana. Even if forge prize boxes or events yield say 80-90% as much profit as speed farming Vanaduke does, it's still a good break from the usual monotonous grind, and very well appreciated. However this incentive does dwindle if the method is say 50% as effective as Vanaduke. I hope this is taken into consideration when designing future farm methods. It's already doing great with the forge prize box method, and I hope events also become more profitable, fun to grind, and introduce replayability.

Thanks and cheers!