To be honest, I am personally somewhat of a casual player myself. I vacillate between playing the game regularly and basically logging on once per day, doing the missions and that's about it. I also have gone completely inactive for months at a time in the past. So I'm fine with not being in the upper tier or whatever. Right now my union is set to get ~3-4 dragon shards from this event, which is fine by me. We got somewhat close to getting to the top 100 actually. I think with time we will get better. I like having control now that I actually have it, as it's nice to be able to set things like burst times or have more sway over buffs during these sorts of events.
I went ahead and awakened Susanoo. And I have been getting the monthly eyes and some of the shards from raid medals, but I'll probably redouble the effort with that.