If we're going to have constant rounds of salt about how yeah, sure, this thing is an awesome powerup but it isn't laser-focused on the specific problem that we want solved today...well, I don't feel a lot of sympathy for that salt.
The big thing about this adventure is that we had Oro intel about what the prize at the end was, and IIRC it's fairly rare to have any kind of intel about these strange locations at all! It was a pretty simple proposition: we need more chakra, this can give us more chakra, just form a cost-benefit analysis based on how long we expect it to take and how much chakra we expect to save thanks to it.
Of course, we did the Planning Fallacy and wildly underestimated how long it would take, and then the buff had an unexpected caveat, and then we also failed to replicate it quickly, so in the end our CBA was
way off. That's what I think the main source of the salt is coming from, summed up from any and all specific objections: in the end, it does not look like the mission was worth it.
Are we frustrated at ourselves, for misjuding the time cost of the journey? At the simulation, for throwing unexpected caveats at us that puncture our assumptions about the buff? At ourselves again, for not adjusting our expectations for the likelihood of unspecified caveats like that and thus being overly optimisic in our CBA? It's probably all of the above, to different degrees, but it's certainly not frustration at
you, at the QMs.
I don't think we're liable to get salty about other spooky dungeons we delve, like we did here. This situation is almost uniquely suited towards this scenario, in how we had the intel necessary to build up optimistic expectations ahead of time, enough outward pressure to make us seriously care about the outcome, and enough rope to hang ourselves with things like the time cost of the adventure. If this were calmer times, with no Akatuski deadline breathing down our neck, I think we'd be a lot more chill about getting whatever kind of reward we find. And if we didn't have remarkably legible intel suggesting it could solve an important problem, we... probably would've shelved it until we weren't in a breakneck race against the Akatsuki, and then delved it in calmer times.
I'm sorry, for my part, for venting my regrets about this mission in communal channels. While it's true that I didn't want to keep them bottled up, I should know better by now that negativity, even if reasonable and non-harmful on its own, can become a torrent of negativity in aggregate. Whatever my regrets about our choice to come out here, you do not deserve that kind of response.
As for the future? I've made it no real secret that I don't see any other adventures with high CBA at this point, which is why I mainly want to go off the map and research a bunch. It's not spite, or doomerism, or anything like that, there's just no immediate problem solved by hunting a scroll or killing crabs for chakra metal specks, and our time is valuable right now. It's a bit lame, but the heart of this mission has always been to try and get as much research done as quickly as possible, until we have what we need to take the world by storm.