The purpose of the event is suppose to be that you have an OP quest available in each episode. Fiasco is an OP quest for hunting *nearly* every enemy that appears in the quest in each episode.
I do 100% agree that presents should be much rarer and slightly better for rates, but this is all in hindsight. In 2016, the rate of a present dropping in a 4p game was 1/2500ish. There were far fewer players on Ephinea back then... This was also before I started playing here, so I don't really know the impact of that event.
In 2017, 2018, and now, it's 1/1500 regardless of numbers of players in a party. The server is also considerably more popular now than it was the past two Christmas events. Two years ago, the 2017 event basically killed the market for some items (FS, SoF in particular) and introduced a couple of ubers. One of those ubers was pretty slope for the time.
In 2018, a number of ubers were introduced that never should have seen the light of day in an event IMO. AFAIK, there were *two* 75 or higher hit Charge Vulcans on the server before Christmas 2018, and one of them was on a dead account. I knew of one 50+ hit Daylight Scar on an active account and one 50+ hit Rambling May. Christmas 2018 didn't completely kill trading lower hit FS and SoF like 2017 did, but it did introduce a number of lower hit ones that were significantly devalued.
It's really, really difficult to balance an event and other servers also have this problem.
Of course if presents were made rare AF next year, people would whine about doing dozens of fiascos and never finding any.. Literally can't win this. But the fact of the matter is that Christmas 2017 was bad for the economy, and Christmas 2018 was bad for the server.