I am not entirely sure, how the drop rate is supposed to work. Judging by the comments, it seems to be that, instead of being it spread evenly and everyone having their small, yet fair (ish) share, now some get most, while others get nothing.

At these number of explores there's no place for luck, it is statistics. The probabilty of getting a certain item is fixed, and there are only small fluctuations when there are hundreds of iterations (about 5% at this scale when it is true random, and looks like it is). As for the time optimization, I used Astrologist, Travelling Magician, level 50 pet and premium island leave feature, plus didn't spend time on anything except quest items, and didn't gather anything extra. I suppose that clearing every island may have increase the time up to three times, and not optimizing search process - up to infinity. There were a lot of islands where I didn't make a single move, just entered and left at once because there were no quest objects. BeastKeeper certainly lacks a resource and money sink, there's no motivation for accumulating regular resources. To be honest, I spent that week mostly grinding festival currency on a popular dragon adoptables game, and another one that require a player to be online every 15 minutes to click a banner to get event materials, and these two activities required tons more time and efforts from me for the same time period. This is why I think that there's almost no grinding in BK comparing with other games. 

I found the pearl drop rate abysmal, finding only a total of 8 pearls with exploring a minimum of two hours a day.  I finally gave up and bought the random boxes to finish.  
And, yes - I used my astrologist and traveling magician and high level pets.  
Most of the kami events have been hard for me, as I don't have unlimited time to play or a bunch of friends playing.  I end up buying the materials.
But, if I want the stuff, a gal's gotta do what a gal's gotta do.   

I generally end up buying or trading what I can.  I have my level 50s my astrologist but not a lot of portal cards and overall horrible luck. But I have gotten all the Kami after the lovecraftian event save the Hopper Just from looking for trades and buying. 

I do concur though....pearl drop rates were bleh it seemed.

Yeah, I found about four, I think. But this event was fun.

I'm not complaining, though. This was way easier than events with battlefield quests -- only so many people can hold particular areas of the battlefield for ten hours over a 7 day period, after all. And only so many battlefield items can be found, come to that.

I like the etelia event particularly, because it was doable. I managed to breed the lykoses after a few false starts, and it may have taken a while to reach level ten but when I did the snowflake was easy to find. Also there were etelias that were easier to defeat than others. Some were absolutely impossible, others were defeated first try. And of course pure snow was so ubiquitous that I'm thinking of making snowglobes for all my friends...

Used either all L50 GP3 pets or other Kami to explore and fight Dita. Astrologist level 3. Used Traveling Magician and at least 100 energy flow cards. Premium subscription to explore more efficiently.

Again, this is all the more reason why it felt inappropriate to beg for assistance. Newer players are totally justified - I was loaned a pet for the first Kami event when I didn't have any pet higher than level 35 - but at this stage I have the resources.

I'm no stranger to game grind. It's just that this particular event was a lot of repetitive work in a short time period. I enjoyed getting an etelia - it was difficult, took some planning, and I could work on it over a period of time. I could spend half an hour, or an hour, or even skip a day without worrying about completion.

Pity it's so long between etelia breedings. 15 days would've been better.

I think this event was pretty fun, personally, even though I spent on the order of 20-25 hours on  grinding through explore.  I'm one of those people who actually likes the explore.  Reading through this thread though, I think something may have gone wrong with the random number generator, because there seem to be two (three?) basic groups:

1) OMG! So much time, so much grinding! ARGH! I barely made it. (this is me)

2)pfft. I was done in less than a day. (for example, birdlove)

3) I had to give up, it was too hard (this may just be the most extreme version of #1)

Granted that I hadn't optimized my exploring, used travelling magician, etc, that is still a really impressive range of results.  We would expect low drop rate items to be hard for everyone, but apparently, they weren't.

Additionnally, I definitely noticed that my pearl drops came in clusters.  I would go through 30 islands with no pearls, and then there would be 3 or 4 on a single island.

MeanDM, I had the same "cluster" drop like you :) This is expectable when the drop rate is low. Then when you take the overall number of explores and divide it by the number of gathered pearls, you get the real chance to find one pearl. And I got very similar rate with you. It looks like all of us with Astrologist and top level pets had the same number of explores in proper biotopes, just the feedback about this number is a bit different :) I stopped counting at one point, but I think I got 250-300 explores total minus tundra for musk. Some of the biotopes, namely desert, provided considerably less seashells, so a few dozens of explores were spoiled to gather white roses. Later I just set my Astrologist to roses themselves just to get out of the desert as fast as possible, but it took some time to gather statistics. I could have been stuck there for ages if I continued to search for pearls there and gathering roses with their natural drop rate. Exploring only Grasslands and Jungle with Astrologist set to pearls provided a steady result.

On a better note...what do you all think about the design similarity here?

Granted there are some key differences. But I find it appropriate, since Dita arrived with BK springtime.

While I'm not completely sure about this, I have a feeling that this event involved so much grinding because of the number of complaints recently that the majority of BK events are not "new user friendly". I had noticed these complaints when I was looking through the comments of the news post that first introduced etelias into the game. There were many people saying that the event was too much trouble for new players due to the difficulty to get to the higher level islands without pets with good genes and high levels, which I definitely agree with a little bit. Until recently, I had not created a "good" squad, and therefore events that involved tasks such as "take control of the crimson tree for 10 hours" were too difficult to accomplish. Because of this, I could see why new players would be complaining that the pets they had weren't good enough to complete the tasks in those events. While I definitely don't know for sure, I think that this event may have been a way of making up for that...an event that requires the same amount of effort from both old and new players no matter how skilled, and not involving the genes and levels of the pets as much. And that is also why I think the drop rate was so low: with more people participating, they would have to make the event a little bit harder to keep the game from flooding with Ditas.

Any thoughts?

I agree with that.

My chief issue is not with the difficulty of the event (although it was an issue for me, sounds like that wasn't the case for others). It is with the design. While there were some neat elements (again, public breeding that encouraged socialization and cooperation was a nice feature), the majority of this event was exploring for items with low drop rates. I can hit a rock with a stick 200 times, and I can explore 10 islands for each pearl. They are the same type of task.

I appreciate that this event was accessible to new players. Anything that equalizes the playing field - sort of like deviants, difficult to obtain but obtainable by all, regardless of wealth - brings new life into the game. I am excited to see content like this.

However, I do maintain that any ingame effort should have an element of fun. Some fostering of creativity, or test of mental skill. I certainly feel that I earned this Kami, but I feel particularly unaccomplished doing so.

Well, some of us were lucky, like Birdlove, some of us were not. For me it was around 7 - 8 hours of grind in total, I was happy I could find any time in my work week - and when Saturday came and I had not even a half of materials needed (like I did not get any white pearl and barely some musk at all form explore), I just bought them from AH. I had to spent 900 000 for materials that people just love to hugely overprice, and Saturday evening I finally got Dita. It's my first Kami, but... I don't feel happy or rewarded with getting her, just frustrated.

And I don't think that any 'new player' has batalion of level 45 - 50 pets for the most rewarding explore or fighting Dita in Arena.

Just a note on what Naervon said because of my previous comments on event trades/auctions.

In this case I do not believe you can call the Pearls and Musks "hugely overpriced." Why? It's simple supply and demand. A large portion of the community had diffiulty acquiring these items and as such a lot of people needed help getting them. They were rare drops, though, and while some people had better luck in finding them they still weren't easy to get. The grind was real...

In any case, of course sellers want to be rewarded for their effort and make a profit. If they were to price them low it would be out of generousity to help people get the Kami, but high prices for rare valued items is reasonable and they are not to be criticized for it; it is people who want to offer next to nothing for rare items that are the swindlers.

The fact of the matter is that high prices can be set because of the demand for the items. If people weren't buying them at the set prices then sellers would just be left with pretty, but essentially useless, items leftover in their inventory. But people did buy the expensive items because they were needed and buying them, even with the high silver cost, was easier than grinding for the items in explore.