>>716163554
The actual answer is far more boring and it's that their internal analytics showed barely anyone bothered doing the hangouts and those who DID do them only reluctantly powered through them because they saw them as an emergency primogem piggy bank (containing like 20% of a single pull) to be opened when they were out of other options
In 5.0 they also tried rebranding the regular story quests into Tribal Chronicles while adding temporary FOMO rewards for doing them while the featured character's banner was up, but this must apparently also not have had its desired effect because later on they started adding those in-game ads on the world map whenever they added a new character quest like in pic related
Considering they then later on said that in Nod-Krai they'll tone down the amount of story quests in general and instead try to incorporate them with the archon quest (AKA the one type of quest most players consider to be the 'mandatory' main quest) then it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that none of their past initiatives really worked out in the end