I agree with you. When royal prizes first came out in the last event, I looked through the prizes and thought, "wow, three blueprints!" I went ahead and bought the royal at 1500 diamonds only to discover that there was no way in heck I would be able to reach the level to get more than one blueprint. Not only do you have to spend the 1500 diamonds, but you darned sure have to spend more diamonds than that if you want to get all the prizes in the royal line. You can't simply spend more time on Elvenar ... I practically live here and I only got one of the blueprints. So basically I paid 1500 diamonds for it when it was only worth 300 ... and yeah, I got a bunch of other prizes for it, but certainly not worth 1200 diamonds to me. It was the blueprints I really wanted, and I figured they were worth 900 so I was willing to spend an extra 600 for the lesser stuff. Not double that. I learned my lesson. I will never again buy the royal package except on the last day of the event, IF I find that I did exceptionally well and got most of the prizes from the royal that I wanted. Then, yeah, I may in the future, but it doesn't look like this is going to be one of those times.
I agree with your other assessments too. The only thing I'm going for is cats and lights. If I happen to uncover a different chest, I get it. If I have to spend a candle on it, I won't bother. It's no fun to have to pass by what could be the daily prize simply because the non-daily is such a bad prize that the candle is worth far more than it is.
If someone wants to slam you, they can slam us both at the same time. I don't blame you for being unhappy.
(and yes, the events of 2019 were much better, in my humble opinion.)