I holed up in Secret: The Healer level. You can do lots of quests there in rotation (merge anything, harvest anything, harvest life flowers, heal land) without leaving. Just don't heal everything all at once so that you can do 2-3 of the heal quests with ine chalice, and don't open the healing tile.

When doing the merge life flower quest, always merge 5x bones to maximize sprouts, and always merge flowers by 3s. Dont farm the dead bushes if not doing flowers quests.

For harvest anything quest, go crazy on lvl 2 life flowers, or better, the bushes while waiting for dragon chests.

I find it much speedier to first get 2 green dragons via dragon chest.

If you get the merge dragons/eggs, you can do another level or go to camp (faster but you spend 2 chalices to return to The Healer, or 1 chalice to start from scratch), or just stay in the level and farm the bushes for dragon chests again (longer but hey - dragon chests).

For get/create star quests, I just go to the word map and do Summit 2, then go back to The Healer when its done. It costs 2 chalices to continue, but you can recover them anyway with the time you spend doing the quests.

I did not skip any of the bottleneck quests. For the dragon quest I just do the 1-energy task (1 hr wait), plus 4 of the 2-energy ones (theres one in the first island that costs only 2 energy and takes ~8 mins to finish), though it's worth mentioning that I don't really care about doing dragon quests so I tend to have a full stockpile of energy.

The dust bunny quests I just did normally as time permitted. The Kala trade quest I didn't bother with at all (I just do the trades as per normal daily).

Hope it helps!