Not that I'm really defending the system, but you may have been really unlucky there (or I've been very lucky):

I've done 5 of them so far, and had one 7 nodes, three 4 nodes and one 2 nodes. One of those also had the rarer item as well, so that was 22 of the items from 5 favors.

As it's on a timer it's important to be as fast as possible in the gathering.