Any room for a middle-grounder here...?
I still do not believe a Grand Prize should be something from a previous event. It's too much like handing out surplus from a warehouse of overstocked merchandise, or leftovers. The least you could do is to put the mechanics, the coding, of the building inside a new image (which I have said before.) Pay someone to draw a new building. Surely InnoGames has a digital artist on staff.
Obviously, they have
many digital artists on staff ... who are all busy creating a boatload of buildings and loadscreen artwork for the next several events. If it were this simple to create a new skin for buildings, they could do so for all these events and address this complaint easily. But while it's easy for us sitting on this end of the process to talk about how much more visual designing they ought to be doing, I strongly suspect it's a lot tougher to follow through on their end.
As for the repeated buildings ... not everyone is able to complete all the events, or land all of the buildings they'd like to get their hands on when opening chests during the course of a major event. Many players weren't even present for those prior events. For some folks, it's nice to have another shot at getting something they missed previously—and these adventures are a good place to do just that. If you don't need or want it yourself, you can be helping others in your FS get it for themselves. I doubt there's a single building to be found on the total list of prizes offered from the very first event on that
every single player in Elvenar would love to have made available again. They can't please everyone with these things, and they know it. All they can do is offer an amenable prize each time around and hope for the best (and Menhirok's Barrow definitely fits that category).
What I'm saying is that the overall tone on the forums got way worse from FA 3 to FA 4 even though the FA got better rewards, and went down far fewer badges, especially the 24/48 ones.
In short, the FA got better, but player response got worse (on the forums)
That's largely because FA 3 was widely (and accurately, in my opinion) regarded as the worst of all the FAs so far
by people who like the concept of the FAs (in other words, not just the pathological complainers)—in no small part because they really
did make the climb so much tougher, and offered some truly junk prizes for the effort. If the players had some time to recover from the stench of it, they might've been more willing to give FA 4 a chance, but shunting it in a mere month later made the negative response inevitable. Chalk it up to bad design in 3 and bad timing for 4, but I think it was baked into the cake from the start this time around.