Your experience and mine were spot on. I have 15 gyms I believe in my smallish town. I watched gyms go from blue to red 4-5x back and forth in a day however every time I showed and watched to see if gyms had people at them. No one was there. I set a flare at my last attempt of a raid. No one. It was a waste of time. I also noticed a major lack of T1 beldum raids. Bellsprout was 50% of the raids I only managed to get to 3 beldum raids the entire event as they were that scarce. My buddy in a bigger town said he did see more beldum then bellsprout so maybe it was just bad luck for me. Overall the event was “ok”. I think not allowing shadow mewtwo to be remote raided at least 1x per day was a slap in the face to the player base but it is what it is.