My guess is Princess is just gonna be tacked onto shards. Even when princess event happened in colos it was just choose your princess at the start and get a reward at the end, nothing special actually happened during the event. Nice thing is its a longer shards event so people can actually stock up on shards, instead of the like 3 day ones.

Item gacha, who knows. It would be fucking amazing if it was bought with pero but thats a pipe dream.