“The game is not designed to have every character maxed out.”
It’s always funny when I see the ppl are trying to explain smth with this statement. Please stop, because that’s not true at any aspect of the game and it never was.
There are many places in the game when you need more than a few of maxed characters: first - friendships missions, second - off duty heroes across the different modes, third - you can’t pick your few favorite toons from the beginning and keep focus on them because not all toons are released from the beginning and besides that the game continue adding new toons in the pool.
And the last but not least - it’s completely boring to play with only few toons.
And please don’t tell me there are enough other ways for getting resources(gold, stamina, exp) in the game. There are NOT.
Taking into account your example with free stamina across the day - it’s barely enough to get 10 orange bits for a badge. Do you know how many bages are needed for a songle charcter?
And from this point of view, the old invasion rewards was a huge gulp for both f2p & p2w players.