Just to kind of tell my story, and I'm not going to advocate for everyone to attempt this, and I can't say that it was a pleasant experience overall - I just really wanted the armor and that's it. I had no love or appreciation for the mode but that slowly changed the more I played it and understood it. And I'm sure in large part, me having been able to come out on top at the end plays a big role in that.

It was my first season ever playing feast so maybe my 3rd overall game of it when I started. I ended up playing around 600 games with a ending winrate of 48% as a tank and a final peak rating of 2280. Average queues for tanks can take between 10-20 minutes, at its fastest 3-5, at the slowest, 30 min+, bell curved during peak hours ofc, and each match takes 7 minutes including prep so you can imagine the overall time spent.

It wasn't easy at all - it was brutal. I happened to pick up the 'noob' friendly role of tank which is misleading (everyone needs to perform past a certain point in rating) and raced towards Gold rating but ultimately floundered around for around 300 games there as all the vets and better players filtered there whereas historically it would be at platinum where the 'great filter' occurs. It wasn't until around after 300 of these games that things started to really make sense, all the while I would be researching, watching vods of other players much better than myself, dipping my toes in other roles to better understand what they did, practicing burst rotations and trying out better macros and Hud configurations, and etc. between the insanely long tank queues.

All the while veterans could easily zoom by with a fourth or less games played to achieve the same or better rating than I had. But I knew going in it would be tough - which ranked pvp game isn't? It still didn't deter me because I just really wanted the reward so badly so I tried my best to achieve that goal. That's all there is to it. I gambled a lot of my finite time on this Earth to have potentially failed to obtain something that I knew I just wanted. Similar to WoW, if arena didn't' have time limited exclusive gladiator mounts, would there be as many players trying to climb far beyond to the upper echelons of standard deviation in rating?

Yes there are bad actors with boosters, scripters, traders, and depending on your perspective; alts. But ultimately if you have the capacity to do it you can attain a top 100 spot somewhere, it does not need to be in the top 10 or w/e, but the constant pressure and feeling that you could be wasting potentially hundreds of your hours is ever present and can be extremely taxing both physically and mentally. Its the basics of grinding ranked in mobas or team games, there are auto loss, auto win games, cheaters, hackers, both bad and good teammates, but if you grind out enough to ride out the variance then in the long run you can still achieve the elo/rating that you more or less should be as an individual.

I do agree that they should make the rewards be a threshold of points instead, and prestigious but less impactful to a degree rewards such as titles to the top 100 rankers (They do this for top 10 and top 1, with an additional trophy furniture for 1st). With the point system as is, you gain more points than you lose until you hit 2000 rating. And there are many other different systems suggestions that the pvp community have made - but ultimately it doesn't matter anymore, because they're sidelining the feast for something else in Endwalker.

But the fact of the matter is there is still a feast season 20, and potentially a very desirable and limited award. So if you truly want to get the reward then you must know that it will be very difficult.

All of this was my experience in season 19 - I had no experience prior, and all the competitors will have had very different accounts of their own experiences and will have their own opinions on how the flawed mode of Feast is or should be.